Laura's Birding Blog

White-eyed Vireo

2012-02-14T02:24:00.002-06:00

(Transcript of Wednesday's For the Birds)

A sputtery little bird of the Southeast, the White-eyed Vireo, produces a dozen or more distinctive songs, each with six to ten highly variable elements, learned by imitating his father and neighbors. But because the notes are delivered so quickly and the songs share the same sputtering quality, many birders who easily identify vireos don’t appreciate the complexity of their songs.

White-eyed Vireo songs may be wondrously complex for aficionados, but these tiny, secretive songbirds are so active, and so good at keeping hidden within dense foliage, that many people tune out their incessant singing. That’s a real shame, because even a quick peek at a White-eyed Vireo can be exciting. The soft grays and yellows of their cryptic plumage are pleasing, and the white iris of their eyes is arresting. When the sky or nearby foliage is intensely colored, the iris may take on a soft milky bluish or greenish hue, but even with a slight reflection of color the white eye is strikingly beautiful.

How do you get a glimpse of such a secretive bird? During the breeding season, they sometimes scold nearby people, making themselves quite easy to see, but most of the year they don’t seem to pay much attention to us, unless we’re disrupting their normal behaviors by playing recordings. They may not actively avoid us, but as they flit about, they are more likely to be working their way away from rather than toward us. But once we start searching the leaves for their tiny flitting movements and learn to follow their song, our patience may be rewarded with a clear, albeit brief, look.

Russ and I spent one morning this January at Lake Kissimmee State Park in Florida. Our target was the Florida Scrub-Jay, one of my most beloved species, but right after a family of scrub jays appeared, a White-eyed Vireo started singing nearby, managing to divert my attention from the jays to himself. It took a full minute, which can feel like an eternity when you’re searching for a hidden bird while one of your favorites is right there in the open, but I finally found the little squirt. He stayed in view on and off for 22 seconds—not long, indeed, but I was watching through my camera and ended up with 18 photos, several of which turned out quite nicely.

If White-eyed Vireos are tricky for us to locate, cowbirds find tracking them far easier. Indeed, about 50 percent of all White-eyed Vireo nests are parasitized by cowbirds, and in these cases usually every one of the vireo chicks dies, if it managed to hatch in the first place. Cowbird eggs hatch 10-12 days after being laid. Meanwhile, it takes White-eyed Vireo eggs 13-15 days of incubation to hatch, and that time can be lengthened if the larger egg of a cowbird is present, holding the incubating adult vireo’s body further from her own eggs.

During winter, White-eyed Vireos usually keep their distance from other small birds of their own and other species by partitioning their habitat and sometimes driving other birds away, but sometimes they join mixed flocks with other species, especially during migration while they’re passing through unfamiliar areas. Most populations have a lull in singing in fall and winter, but the resident Florida subspecies does n’t, which is how I was able to so easily enjoy the one I had so much fun with in January. The spring singing period for a White-eyed Vireo wintering along the Gulf Coast begins as early as February. Being alert to their brief but oft-repeated song may provide you, too, with a quality experience with this tiny sprite.

Production of today’s For the Birds was made possible in part by a generous grant from Vickie and Barry Wyatt.

Valentine's Day

2012-02-14T01:06:00.004-06:00

(Transcript of today's For the Birds)

I have no idea why, but this year, 2012, I’ve seen more commercials and advertisements promoting Valentine’s Day than I can ever remember seeing before. Many of them seem to be telling men that giving a woman an expensive trinket is the pathway to eliciting mating behaviors, rather in the manner of the bowerbirds of New Guinea and Australia. Although many female birds select their mate on the basis of how high quality his territory may be, which helps her evaluate how likely she is to successfully raise young with him, I sense a less focused and less justifiable materialism in people—at least the ones this year’s Valentine’s Day ads seem to be targeting.

Birds symbolize love and romance for a lot of people—we refer to romantic couples as lovebirds and their behavior to each other as billing and cooing, and we even use the euphemism the birds and the bees rather than say the word sex, so it’s small wonder a lot of Valentine’s Day cards feature birds on them.

But on February 14, few birds are actually feeling romantic, at least not in our neck of the woods. Chickadees are starting to sing in earnest, but these Norwegian bachelor farmers of the bird world are still avoiding any kind of contact with their own or the opposite sex. It’ll take until May for them to overcome their inhibitions to do what birds and bees and educated fleas do, and female chickadees will lay 8 or 9 eggs in a single clutch so they won’t have to do that again for another year.

Robins are still hanging out in their sociable winter flocks, utterly devoid of any romantic impulses. It will take increasing day length as we approach the spring equinox for them to separate from their convivial group and enter into any kind of exclusive relationship.

Hummingbirds would make horrible symbols for Valentine’s Day—males certainly do enjoy mating during the breeding season, but I doubt if they have any concept of the fact that this fun if brief behavior leads to the production of young. A male hummingbird pays no attention to either his mate or chicks except to steer clear of the female if she gets annoyed and flares her white tail spots at him.

A few Bald Eagles are eyeing their nest trees again. Eagles mate for life, and we sometimes use this as evidence of a strong pair bond, but in reality, they only stay together because they can’t work out a property settlement. Eagles tend to be deeply in love, with their nest site. A pair cooperates with egg incubation, brooding chicks, and feeding nestlings, but they take separate vacations in winter and if another eagle of the opposite sex turns up at the nest first the next year, the eagle of the former pair will be perfectly happy to settle for it. If the original mate then turns up, he or she will fight the newcomer while the mate bides his or her time waiting to see how it all works out and who he or she will finally end up with.

Great Horned Owls are a perfect symbol of Valentine’s Day for all but the squeamish. These birds mate for life, and appear genuinely affectionate toward each other during their Steve and Eydie stage, when they often sing duets long into the night, and occasionally preen one another’s faces. Many female Great Horned Owls are on eggs now, but the males provide for them by bringing delicacies back to the nest. Any mere mortal can say it with flowers. It takes true love and commitment to say it with skunk.

Rehabbing Nighthawks

2012-02-11T09:27:00.010-06:00

During the 1980s and 90s and a bit into the oughts, I was a licensed wildlife rehabber. I mostly took care of non-raptors, keeping hawks and owls here only until they could be transported to the Raptor Center. I became fascinated with nighthawks (belonging to Caprimulgiformes, and so only distantly related to owls and not at all to hawks) the moment I held my first. I got a call one spring morning from a construction worker north of Duluth. I went to the site, and three young, rugged men were standing together, one holding the nighthawk close to his breast. He looked at me and asked, “Can you make it better?” The bird, an adult male, had a broken wing, apparently caused by a collision with an overhead power line. Most nighthawks brought to rehabbers have been injured in collisions. Either sex may be hit by cars, often when chasing an insect illuminated in headlight beams. And either sex may collide with wires, but adult males seem to be the ones most often hurt by them in spring, presumably when doing their booming courtship dives.

Although the wing was broken and skewed, there was no external bleeding, so it at least wasn't a compound fracture. If the men's pleading eyes weren't enough to make me want to do my best, something about the bird's calm, dark eyes, looking directly into mine, touched me deeply. This was the most Zen-like bird I'd ever touched.

When I brought him home and opened the box I'd carried him in, I was greeted by the most horrible smell I'd ever experienced—worse even than from a Great Horned Owl that had spent time with a skunk—along with a slimy liquid, very dark brown mess. I figured that under the stress of being injured and handled by people, the poor bird had developed diarrhea.

I opened and thawed a small container of unflavored Pedialyte (whenever I bought a bottle, I divided it up into smaller portions which I froze and kept on hand for emergencies). I dipped my index finger into it, and then brought the one drop clinging to my finger up to his bill. As it dribbled onto the tip, the sensitive feathers along the sides of his mouth detected the fluid and he sipped it up, and looked eager for more. I gave him several drops—this would help prevent dehydration and also shock if his electrolytes had gotten out of balance.

I had some Vet Wrap on hand (that 3M special tape used by veterinarians and, under a different name, by doctors. It sticks to itself but not to skin, fur, or feathers) so I very carefully aligned the wing bones, held the slit half of a plastic drinking straw against the wing to brace the radius and ulna in place, and wrapped the wing against his body with Vet Wrap.

Then I had to figure out what to feed him. I called my good friend Koni Sundquist, who had cared for many nighthawks while she was rehabbing, and she said to give him mealworms, crickets, and a mixture she'd developed over the years based on mashed dry dog food, crumbled hard-boiled egg yolk, and several other ingredients to provide the vitamins and minerals he needed. (This was before Kaytee Exact was available.) She said to mix it with enough water to make a mash the consistency of cookie dough, and to feed it to him in pea-sized morsels. She said it might be tricky to get him to open his mouth at first.

Tricky didn't begin to describe it. I'd never fed a bird by hand before except nestlings which eagerly opened their mouths for food. His beak was so tiny! When I tried to open it, the upper and lower mandibles seemed barely attached to his mouth, which was enormous. The soft edges of the two sides seemed extremely fragile. And his tongue was just a vestigial flap way in back--useless for helping him swallow.

Holding this poor injured bird and teasing his mouth open, I felt so clumsy and brutish. I finally opened it wide enough to pop in a plop of food, and closed his mouth, but within moments, the food popped back out covered with slime. I tried over and over, each time petrified that I was going to injure that fragile mouth, but each time I finally got a plop of food in, it came back out, sometimes within seconds, and sometimes after a minute or more, right when I was thinking he'd finally swallowed it. Finally I figured out that his tongue was too tiny to help the food down his throat. So when I got another plop of food in, I tried gently stroking his chin and throat to see if that would help. Victory! For the next couple of days, every time I fed him, I first had to work that fragile mouth open, and then when I got food in, had to stroke his throat to help work it down the hatch. After a couple of days, he'd open his mouth when he saw that I had food, but the food would still pop back out, glistening with slime, whenever I didn't stroke his throat. By the next week, he'd run up to me, holding his good wing up and his capacious mouth wide open whenever he wanted food, but for a good three weeks I had to rub his throat to get him to swallow it down. Eventually he finally got whatever muscles he needed to use to swallow in shape.

I went through this experience with several adult male nighthawks. Meanwhile, adult females often had the same difficulty swallowing at first, but in a day or two, and never longer than a week, they were swallowing food on their own. Chicks never needed help swallowing.

I finally realized what was going on. In nature, chicks are fed regurgitated food by their mothers until they can catch it themselves. So naturally, they can swallow food placed in their mouths. As they learn to fly, they quickly learn to fly straight into insects with their mouths open. During the time they're still learning, their mother continues to feed them, but little by little, they're getting most of their food on the wing. I suspect the tongue is reduced to help the food go straight into the throat without any obstructions, and as they hit a moth, beetle, or other flying insect at about 15 miles per hour, the food goes straight down the open throat, thickly covered with cushioning mucus, and straight into the esophagus without any real "swallowing." Young birds still have the ability to use muscles in their mouth and throat to swallow, and adult females must keep those muscles working at least well enough to regurgitate food to their young, but males have no need to use them after becoming independent from their mothers' feedings. So it takes them time to get good at swallowing again.

Over the years, I also found that once a nighthawk—adult or immature—started running to me with the mouth agape for food, it invariably held its wings straight up (unless it was restrained by an injury) while approaching. This is the way young nighthawks beg for food from their parents. Adults usually kept the wings lowered while actually eating, though.

I expected that first nighthawk's droppings to clear up once he became more relaxed in captivity, but they never did. That is, most of his droppings were typical bird droppings, with brown fecal matter and white urates. They were a bit smellier than the droppings of most species, but I got used to that. But once a day, he'd make that same smelly, slimy dark brown liquid. I figured he had some kind of intestinal disorder. But as I took care of other nighthawks, I discovered this was characteristic of every single one of them. I had no idea what was going on, so I started asking people who'd handled them. Banders complained that nighthawks often released one of these awful liquid messes right while being handled, and rehabbers knew exactly what I was talking about, but people who'd studied them in the field never seemed to know about this and no one seemed to know how or why they produced yucky droppings in the first place.

I started buttonholing ornithologists at meetings asking about this, but none of them had a clue. I wrote to Joe T. Marshall at the Smithsonian because I knew he'd kept nighthawks in captivity for study. (After Edmund Jaeger wrote some papers about torpor or hibernation in Common Poorwills during the 1940s, Dr. Marshall tried to induce torpor in some young nighthawks that he had raised.) He wrote back saying he'd never noticed their droppings at all, and noted that perhaps I did because I still had children in diapers. Oh, dear—the scariest thing is that perhaps this was indeed why I'd paid so much attention to the issue!

Finally, I read a book about Ruffed Grouse by Gordon Gullion in which he made reference to the grouse's "caecal droppings." I went back to my ornithology textbooks looking up whatever that might be, and found that these would be ejected by the "caeca" or "ceca," paired offshoots where the large and small intestines meet, where our appendix is. My textbooks stated that caeca are found in gallinaceous birds and some others, but didn't say which others or what the function was. Gullion stated that in Ruffed Grouse, the caeca grow enormous in winter and atrophy in spring. This is where anaerobic bacteria digest the cellulose in the woody buds that grouse eat all winter. Gullion noted how smelly the once-a-day caecal droppings were, due to these anaerobic bacteria.

Nighthawks don't have any cellulose in their diets, so I was mystified. And I still wasn't sure that they even had caeca. I dissected one bird that had been brought to me dead (for some reason, I couldn't bear to dissect the few that died under my care), and saw what looked like caeca, but wanted someone more knowledgeable than I to verify this. Finally I found a book about avian morphology by Beddard from 1898, and sure enough, the family does indeed have well-developed caeca. But why? Suddenly it hit me! Nighthawks may not digest cellulose, but they do have to digest an equally difficult substance, chitin. Perhaps the caeca have anaerobic bacteria that digest that material!

I was getting so fascinated with the question that I got the contact information for one of the world authorities on avian digestion, Gary Duke, who was co-founder of the Raptor Center and was right down in the Twin Cities! I called him on the phone to explain what I knew and what I wanted to know, and he got so excited that he asked me if I wanted to put together a Ph.D. program to figure it out! This was before he even knew that I'd won the Frances F. Roberts Award for a paper I'd presented at a joint meeting of the Cooper and Wilson Ornithological Societies in 1992. I was thrilled!

My Ph.D. never panned out. I took a term of full-time classes in the Twin Cities in veterinary and avian physiology, but my kids were in elementary school and still pretty young, so spending Monday through Friday in the dorm down there was tricky even with my most cooperative husband. I was doing a lot of research at home after that, and Gary and I videographed the entire digestion process of two nighthawks, beginning when they each swallowed a bolus of barium-coated food and tracing the food's progress all the way through the digestive tract and out again. Then Gary developed Alzheimer's disease and had to retire early. Some of his work, including the videotape we'd made, are lost. But he was certain that I'd worked out the reason nightjars and owls have well developed caeca. (Many owls also eat insects, and my education Eastern Screech-Owl's droppings have the distinctive odor of a nighthawk's droppings, though not as strongly odoriferous.)

Gary Duke's death was an enormous loss to me personally, and to the ornithological world. I've so treasured his knowledge, the fun yet wonderfully practical ways he approached solving problems, and his amazing knowledge of how bird bodies work. The world lost a valuable scientist and wonderful person when he died. But that same world already has one-too-many Dr. Lauras, so my losing my shot at a Ph.D. was not that big a deal.

The nighthawks I kept for extended periods were almost all adults with injured wings. They never required caging--I had a special room for them, and they could walk around or jump onto low perches to look out the window.

Nestlings and fledglings could not be caged either, because their flight feathers (wings and tail both) are extremely fragile. When they'd be captive for more than a day or two, I used waxed paper or cut up a stamp-collection envelope to make little light-weight wrappings for each non-broken feather.

Nighthawk legs are so short that even without banging wings against the bars of a cage, the tail and wing tips can be abraded simply by contact with the floor, as happened to this nighthawk who was kept in a small box until brought to me. I had to over-winter it while the feathers were replaced.

Nighthawk flight feathers can easily get gooped up, and then broken, and the tissue on their feet can be damaged, by extended contact with their own poop, so even more than most birds, their surroundings need to be kept very clean. Those extremely smelly and very liquid cecal droppings, produced about once a day, make this especially crucial.

Nighthawk feet are flat and delicate, and their legs short. Their claws are somewhat flattened, especially the center one, which is pectinated, or comb-like. I've observed them preening and scratching a lot, and that pectinated claw seems to be effective at pulling out loose down feathers.

I kept one adult male nighthawk (no idea how old he was when he first arrived, but I suspect he must have been several years old because it took him three weeks to be able to swallow food) for eight years as a licensed education bird. I named him Fred for Mr. Rogers, because he was so gentle and calm, because his flat feet reminded me of Mr. Rogers's sneakers, and because after about a half hour being stared at by children, he suddenly reached the end. He'd suddenly turn his back on them and look at me with pleading eyes. That was my signal to put him back in his carrier.

Fred was a steadying influence on other nighthawks that came to me. They were always drawn to him, and usually pressed themselves against him. One active young female seemed to irritate him, and he'd often walk to other areas of the room to evade her, but overall, he accepted other nighthawks readily.

One of my saddest nighthawk experiences came when I was brought an adult female who had been found along a roadside in western Minnesota, and flown to me in Duluth via Northwest Airlines. One of her eyes was destroyed—I think maybe struck by an car's antenna tip, because she didn't have any other injuries. She seemed to adore Fred, and kept her blind side pressed against him all the time when she wasn't sitting on my lap with her blind side pressed against me. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a vet who was willing to enucleate her, and the poor bird was constantly battling infections. She would have made a superb education bird and wonderful lifetime companion for Fred because of her calm and trusting ways. I still miss her.

I was doing some counting at Hawk Ridge during the years that I was rehabbing, and when the weather was pleasant, I'd bring Fred along. He'd sit on the ground at my feet all day keeping me company. When hawks passed over, he'd make a soft rit rit rit sound. Sometimes the hawks were beyond my visual range, and could only be seen if I had my 10x Zeiss binoculars on them--I'd know exactly where to scan the skies by the direction he was looking. When peregrines flew over, he not only called--he waddled into the very back of the carrier. Minutes later he'd start inching his way back to the front, and very carefully scanned the skies, sometimes for 15 minutes or more, before coming out again. I made the mistake one day of bringing along a still-flightless chick along with Fred. She kept wandering off and getting into trouble, but I couldn't imprison her in the carrier because she'd have damaged her feathers, so I had to hold her on my lap all day.

I've successfully "hacked out" two chicks by releasing one in my own backyard and one at my mother-in-law's place in Port Wing, where the birds returned to me several times a day for feedings as they grew more independent. Nighthawks and their relatives are so difficult to rear in captivity that this issue hasn't been faced or written about by many people.I feel lucky that they knew me and recognized my voice well enough to return when I called.

The first nighthawk I ever released, that one that came to me at that construction site, healed well. One night in August he grew suddenly very restless, and when I looked out the window, I saw hundreds of nighthawks flying over my yard. Back then, we had nights when thousands, or tens of thousands, migrated along the North Shore. I took him out. Russ came out with me. I held him in my opened hands for several minutes as he watched dozens, hundreds of nighthawks wending their way all toward the sunset. (Along the north shore, birds are moving west-southwest.) Suddenly he opened his wings and rose into the sky and moved with the others into the beautiful sunset sky. I kept my eyes on him as he grew smaller and smaller. At just the moment when he was about to disappear, suddenly he turned around and flew directly toward me. He flew over my head three or four times, looking down at me. I was sobbing—filled with a joy I'd never known even as I knew I'd never see him again.

Russ witnessed the whole thing. Twice after this a nighthawk has returned like this, as if saying farewell, or thank you, or something. I can't explain it. The third time this happened was the day after I'd gotten word that Jeff Sonstegard, the illustrator of my first book, was dying. I rushed to Longville to see him one last time when I happened to have a nighthawk due to be released. Weather conditions sounded better in Longville than in Duluth, so I brought it along. Jeff had drawn several nighthawks for my book but had never seen one personally. So I let him hold the bird in his hands and he was the one to release it. That bird flew up, joining with other nighthawks, and then returned to fly over our heads. Jeff talked about the experience with his family on the way to the university hospital the next day, and soon went into a coma.

My love for nighthawks is so deep-rooted that I can't even begin to express it, but it's rooted in these experiences, in watching them booming in spring, and in sitting on my roof or on a rock along Lake Superior watching hundreds migrating in the sunset sky. This gentle-spirited bird has vanished from most of the places where it used to be common or even abundant, and attention must be paid. I hope my experiences help rehabbers, and hope you'll share any additional information that should be here.

John Schoenherr's drawing of nighthawks
from the book Rascal

Snowy Owls in the Big Apple

2012-02-10T08:36:00.002-06:00

(Transcript of today's For the Birds)

Two weeks ago, I was bewailing the fact that despite this being a national-news-making Snowy Owl invasion year, I hadn’t seen a single one. Then, on February 5, when Russ and I were in New York City, we took our daughter and her boyfriend birding along the beach at Breezy Point Tip in Queens. I wanted to see Brants—saltwater geese that I’ve seen a couple of times and don’t have any good photos of. Instead, we found two Snowy Owls. The first was a gorgeous adult male—pure white—and the other was either a female or young male, speckled with brown.

I hadn’t been keeping track of sightings on eBird, but other birders had, and several were at Breezy Point Tip specifically to see these Snowy Owls. The white one had been seen in another place until the day before, when some photographers got too close and scared him off. When he made it to this beach, he got into a territorial spat with the Snowy Owl already here, and chased it further along the beach. Birders were thrilled to see two of them in the same area, but the owls were in an uneasy truce, and probably found the situation more stressful than people appreciate. It was a bright, sunny day, and my photos of the adult male show his eyes almost entirely closed. Birders tend to think this shows the owl is relaxed, but owls usually keep their eyes mostly closed during daylight. Unlike us, owls see perfectly well when their eyelids are opened a crack. Holding their eyes partly closed blocks a lot of sunlight and reduces the chances of crows, hawks, and other birds noticing their distinctive yellow eyes and harassing them.

While we were watching from a distance, two photographers approached the male.

This was not just unethical from a bird protection standpoint, it was out-and-out illegal, because they were trampling posted breeding habitat for endangered birds. There were signs all over the place specifically prohibiting walking onto the sensitive dunes. It’s frustrating enough in a large wild habitat such as the Sax-Zim Bog, where birds have a lot of suitable habitat nearby if they do get scared off a particular tract. In largely wild areas there’s still a danger of shooing them off right when a passing car or truck can hit them, but in New York City, it’s hard for them to find appropriate habitat, and the surrounding dangers are far greater.

A lot of people have expressed surprise that Snowy Owls would ever turn up in the Big Apple in the first place. For me, it wasn’t all that bizarre seeing these magnificent birds of the frozen wilderness against a backdrop of the Brooklyn and Manhattan skylines

or a Coney Island Ferris wheel,

because I saw my own first Snowy Owl along Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, I’ve seen several along the Milwaukee lakeshore, I used to hop off my bus at a stop near downtown Madison, Wisconsin, to see a Snowy Owl that wintered along Lake Monona, and up here I see the vast majority of them right in the Duluth and Superior harbor areas. Indeed, when Russ and I drove home from New York, the first bird I saw as we crossed into Duluth was a Snowy Owl perched atop a light pole on the Blatnik Bridge. Snowy Owls would prefer wilder terrain, I’m sure, but there just isn’t much left anymore. We build our biggest cities on the best shorelines and coasts, and the biggest areas of windswept fields and marshes have been claimed for agriculture. Minimizing the pressures these magnificent creatures face when they grace us with their presence is the very least we can do.

Reflections on Groundhog Day 2012 in D.C.

2012-02-02T07:36:00.009-06:00

(Transcript of today's For the Birds)

Russ and I have been spending a few days in Washington D.C. while he attends meetings for work. Yesterday, February first, I took a walk around the mall. I was on a mission—I’d just finished reading the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and badly wanted to see the Grant Memorial.

I asked at least a dozen people where it was, but not one Washingtonian that I asked had even known there was a memorial to Grant. So I wandered from the Vietnam Memorial,

and the Lincoln Memorial,

to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial.

Then I wended my way to the Capitol, which is where Grant’s Memorial turned out to be.

The statue of him on his horse is the second largest equestrian statue in the United States, and fourth largest in the world, with only the statue of Don Juan de Oñate, in El Paso, Texas, the Genghis Khan Equestrian Statue in Mongolia, and the monument to Italy's King Victor Emanuel in Rome larger. I didn’t care about that—after reading his memoirs, I found I just really, really like Ulysses S. Grant.

Even though I was searching for one specific thing, I of course was watching for birds, too. Hundreds of Canada Geese grazed on the lawn beneath the Washington Monument—I scanned through all of them in an optimism-fueled spurt of energy, hoping I could convert a small group of them to Brants, but had no luck with that.

The Reflecting Pool is currently being repaired and was completely dry, but the Tidal Basin held quite a few Ring-necked Ducks and a pair of Buffleheads in addition to the ubiquitous Mallards. A couple of Great Blue Herons and a Belted Kingfisher also graced its shores.

Ring-billed Gulls seem to be everywhere in D.C. I always scan them carefully, and invariably see something else—yesterday it was a Great Black-backed Gull. House Sparrows and starlings are also ubiquitous. And I get a kick out of the squirrels that scamper about. There were a lot of Chinese visitors to the Mall yesterday, and I came upon two crowds of them gathered near and photographing squirrels. One Chinese student told me that they virtually never see wild birds and mammals in China. I couldn’t help but wonder if our country isn’t on a slow but steady path in that same direction.

Yesterday was just a few hours from January, but the hundreds of robins feeding in large flocks were no sign of spring—Washington is well within their typical wintering range, and except during the breeding season, robins are extremely sociable. But I came upon one sight that made me think Groundhog Day is completely meaningless this year, at least in D.C. Some small trees near the Freer Gallery seemed to be glowing pink.

I was shocked to realize I’d come upon a grove of cherry trees that were coming into full bloom! I may have been surprised, but the dozens of bees feeding in the flowers seemed utterly at home.

For me, bees and cherry blossoms aren’t just a sign of spring—they’re the very definition of spring. So at least in Washington D.C. this year, Groundhog Day has no meaning whatsoever. I’m sure there will be wintry weather here again, these blossoms will die, and these trees won’t be bearing fruit this year. But anyone who still denies that the climate is changing dramatically is wearing blinders.

I finally worked my way to Grant’s Memorial.

After taking lots of photos, I sat down with a group of Ring-billed Gulls to eat my lunch.

It was a lovely day even if it was filled with sobering reminders of much impact our burgeoning human population is having on the natural world.

Space Coast Birding and Nature Festival

2012-01-31T09:41:00.005-06:00

(Transcript of today's For the Birds)

Last weekend, Russ and I attended the annual Space Coast Birding and Nature Festival, centered in Titusville, Florida. It was a splendid way to spend a few days in January, for birders of any level. The field trips give people new to the area a great overview of the best birding spots and expert help in finding and identifying the birds. Many people who live in central Florida year-round or throughout the winter learn about new hot spots, make new friends who are interested in birds, and get tips about recognizing their local birds and understanding their behaviors.

I was there to give a talk and to lead a field trip for beginners, but that left a lot of time for birding. I had three primary goals: to take a photo of a gannet, even if it was extremely far out, to take a better photo of a Black Skimmer’s eye to show the vertical pupil—something I just discovered that skimmers have, and to take a halfway decent photo of a Belted Kingfisher. For some reason that bird is my nemesis species as far as photography goes. I’ve got lots and lots of photos of kingfishers from a long distance, but none of them up close and personal.

But I also just wanted to see lots and lots of birds. Russ and I went to some of our favorite places, and ended up seeing well over 100 species. The Viera Wetlands in Melbourne, a bit south of Titusville, is great for a wide assortment of wading birds at very close range, including nesting herons and anhingas, and a generous supply of raptors. In a single day, we had 10 species of hawks and falcons in that one small area, including the splendid Crested Caracara.

We went there one day when the weather was gorgeous and the lighting perfect, and another day when the skies were densely overcast. On neither day did a kingfisher sit anywhere where we could get a photo, though one of them did a great tease, waiting on a nearby perch until my camera was almost pointed at it. At that moment, of course, it vanished.

We also visited the wildlife loop on Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge twice, again on one wonderfully sunny day, and then on a day when the lighting was awful. Hundreds of Black Skimmers were snoozing on the beach by the bridge on the way to the Island.

Although I didn’t get as close as I wanted because there were just too many people on the beach, I did get a better photo of some of their eyes.

As always, I saw bazillions of kingfishers, but only on the second day, when the light was very bad, did I get serviceable photos. They’re much grainier than I wanted, but for now they’re as good as anything I’ve ever had.

The bird I most wanted photos of was the Northern Gannet. I saw my lifer—both the first and the last gannet I’ve ever seen in the wild—in November 1988 on Cocoa Beach, so Russ and I spent one afternoon on Cocoa Beach, but that was unfortunately when the light was very poor. But as I said, I didn’t care how good my photo was as long as it showed an identifiable gannet, and that was easy enough. I didn’t have to work very hard to see them, this being late enough in winter that a great many have made their way to the Florida coast.

My photos show them in all plumages from immature through adult.

Russ and I also went to the Canaveral Seashore on a sunny morning, and there I got more photos. Many of the pictures are better than I expected, but it’s good that I set my goal nice and low, because not one of my photos is what anyone would call good.

I’m already making plans for next year’s Space Coast Birding and Nature Festival. It’s a great excuse to get down where an array of birds are abundant and easy to see, right when I need a little break from winter.

Now it will be fun to return home to spend time with my own dear chickadees and other winter-hardy birds.

Mr. Tweed

2012-01-27T22:33:00.004-06:00

In memory of my high school English teacher, Robert Tweed, 1926–2012

When I walked into Robert Tweed’s senior English class for the first time in 1968, I was one petrified 16-year-old. This tall, handsome man, not just a regular English teacher but head of the department, with his oh-so-proper English-sounding name—what could be more intimidating to a working class girl? But the moment Mr. Tweed spoke, his soft, gentle voice made me feel that everything would be okay.

He gave our class an exposure to a wide variety of films, plays, and great literature, and led fascinating discussions that led us to appreciate them on a much more mature and even sophisticated level. He assigned one major term paper on our own choice of theme, based on five novels we chose from a recommended list. I chose the topic “War,” and read All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, A Farewell to Arms, The Bridge over the River Kwai, and Catch-22. Yes, Catch-22—Mr. Tweed encouraged us to read controversial books, didn’t set them apart from more traditional literature, and not only expected us to discuss them intelligently, but led by example. It was exciting to realize that a man who dressed, spoke, and carried himself so formally was open to discussing such a wide spectrum of ideas and equally varied ways of expressing them. His class freed me up to start questioning some of my own long-held ideas and beliefs, and enlarged my view of the world and my place in it.

We also spent a lot of time on grammar, including diagramming wondrously intricate sentences. I loved this, and the ever-increasing complexity made the diagramming more challenging and fun for me. Mr. Tweed patiently listened to a lot of complaints about sentence diagramming, but in the end defended it not only as an important way of ensuring that we truly grasped the fundamentals of grammar but also as a valuable exercise in logic. He had a way of making me feel proud to be a geek.

No one in my family, and none of our family friends, had gone to college. Many students’ parents encouraged them to go to college even if they hadn't gone themselves, but mine were very mistrustful of what my dad thought was nothing more than a breeding ground for hippies. I had no clue what college even was. But Mr. Tweed was not just adamant that I should go—it was as if he could not even conceive of my not going. He was one of a group of teachers who came to my house unannounced to persuade my parents to send me to college, and was one of the ones responsible for my receiving a scholarship to the University of Illinois. He also encouraged me to take a test that placed me in a special freshman rhetoric class that proved to be one of the most memorable and important college classes I took, and obtained the reading list so I could prepare myself. Imagine having a teacher who took that much interest in his students! At a very fundamental level, I owe everything I’ve achieved in my life to Robert Tweed.

I can’t remember any teacher revealing as much about his personal life as Mr. Tweed did, yet he was also one of the most modest and unassuming teachers I’ve ever had, and the most profoundly sincere. He told us that he’d grown up on a farm and for a while when he was a child, his family was on welfare. I drew from this my first inklings that I could dream of and make for myself an entirely different kind of life from that I’d always known. What an empowering thought! I don’t remember him mentioning birds specifically in his classes, but the skills he gave me and, more importantly, the confidence I started to feel under his encouragement provided the foundation for my career as a writer and public speaker.

Mr. Tweed was a bachelor, and the year we had him was the year he started dating his wife Rosemary. One of the other students happened to see them on a date, and when she mentioned it in class, he blushed adorably. When Russ and I were in college, we visited West Leyden once after Mr. Tweed had married, and he invited us to dinner to meet “my Rosie.” He was so proud to introduce us to her! I’d not grown up knowing that men outside of those in movies could be so deeply in love. Their relationship was lovely to see.

It’s not until we are decades removed from high school that we can appreciate how much our teachers influence our futures, for better and for worse. I was lucky enough to comprehend what Robert Tweed gave me in time to thank him. And I was doubly blessed, because in the past decade, the man who was one of my most inspirational teachers also became one of my most beloved and treasured friends. I visited him a handful of times, and Russ and I attended his 80th birthday party in La Crosse. We lived hundreds of miles apart, but he and I had many lovely telephone conversations discussing everything from music and literature to politics, religion, and fundamental issues of right and wrong. In the past couple of years, his health began to fail, but his mind was as quick-witted and fully engaged as ever.

How I will miss this brilliant and gentle man who taught me English, and gave me the world.

Northern Gannet

2012-01-19T22:22:00.005-06:00

Transcript of For the Birds, January 20, 2012

Northern Gannet photo by Al Wilson, http://www.naturespicsonline.com/

I’m headed to Florida’s Space Coast Birding Festival the last weekend of January. I will be spending a lot of time gawking at spectacular birds so close that I’ll need to crank down my zoom lens to fit them on my camera screen. But whenever I’m on the coast, I’ll be scanning the horizon, trying to pick out a very distant Northern Gannet. In 1988, Russ and I spent Thanksgiving in Florida, and brought our kids to Cocoa Beach. They all went swimming while I manned my spotting scope, searching for any sign of a gannet. After a long search, I finally picked one out, diving far far out in the distance. It’s the only gannet I’ve ever seen in the wild. Russ had already seen several at close range, when he was out on the Atlantic on a research vessel while working on his Ph.D.

Gannets are huge birds, averaging over 3 feet long from tip of beak to tip of tail, with a 6-foot wingspan, and they’re fairly heavy, weighing over 6 ½ pounds. They fly 30–130 feet above the water, and when they spot a fish set their wings in a steep arrow and plunge-dive straight down, hitting the water at a speed of over 60 miles per hour. An extensive network of air sacs between their muscles and skin absorbs the shock of impact. Even from a distance, the sight of this plunge-diving gannet is thrilling.

Northern Gannet photo by http://www.naturespicsonline.com

Gannets breed in the seas of the far north. The gannets that breed in North America are concentrated in 6 breeding colonies, three in the Gulf of St. Lawrence off Québec and three on the Atlantic coast off Newfoundland. During winter, they fly and fish their way down the Atlantic, largely within waters overlying the continental shelf from New England to Florida and then west along the Gulf Coast to Texas and northeastern Mexico. Adults tend to stay much further north than young birds. The Birds of North America entry for gannets says some first-year individuals may remain in tropical waters during first breeding season, but more young gannets remain in the Gulf of Mexico than most scientists realized before the BP oil spill. A paper published in October 2011 in Biology Letters said that using modern bird-tracking techniques, scientists have learned that more than twice as many young gannets winter in the Gulf of Mexico than were believed to, and yet adults are far less common in the Gulf than scientists thought.

Northern Gannets suffered the highest oiling among beach-wrecked birds recovered after the spill, as I saw firsthand with one of my friends, Vickie. She and I spent a few hours in August 2010 attending a press briefing at the Theodore Oiled Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic near Mobile, Alabama. The only birds we saw in the treatment room were immature gannets.

The staff, including the US Fish and Wildlife Service representative briefing us, seemed mystified why so many gannets had become oiled, and why every one of them was an immature, but this was during the height of the breeding season, when adults were thousands of miles north. Gannets fishing are essentially taking random samples of the waters—the spill was so huge, and so dispersed, with some of it well below the surface, that of course a great many of the birds diving deep into the water and swimming about were going to find themselves in oil plumes. Hundreds of oiled gannets washed to shore, a small percentage of the actual number oiled. Gannets live entirely in the deep water far from shore, and most of their bodies aren’t carried so far.

Fortunately, overall gannet numbers are strong, and assuming we don’t hit them with more Gulf oil spills, they should fully recover. I’m hoping against hope to see one in Florida. I need to cleanse my brain of the images of those poor oiled gannets on clinic tables, wrapped in blankets and struggling for survival. Seeing one flying strong above the ocean, setting its wings, and plunging into the depths is exactly what I need.

Snowy Owl

2012-01-19T00:21:00.000-06:00

(Transcript of today's For the Birds)

I have a painful confession to make. Here it is, January 19, 2012, a year when news reports from all over the continent and beyond are telling of a Snowy Owl invasion of epic proportions, and I haven’t seen a single one. I’ve driven through Superior and along Highway 13 to and from Port Wing several times this season, and Russ and I scoured the Duluth Port Terminal twice, but I just can’t seem to spot one. I know I’ve seen my fair share over my lifetime, and expect I’ll eventually get one this season, but it’s very strange for me to be so far behind on something this wonderful.

Oddly enough, although the Duluth-Superior area has had a typical number of Snowy Owls this year, we don’t seem to have any more than usual. Meanwhile, they are appearing in places far south of where they usually winter throughout the continent—there have been sightings from Nova Scotia to the Olympic Peninsula, and as far south as Oklahoma, Kansas, and southern Missouri. One poor hapless Snowy Owl flew thousands of miles over the ocean, making it all the way to Honolulu. Unfortunately, the spot it was drawn to happened to be the Honolulu airport. Airport officials decided it posed a threat to aircraft and rather than trapping and relocating the poor, exhausted bird, they shot it.

Snowy Owls in other places have been killed or injured by cars and power lines, and some have been retrieved that were clearly starving. Ironically, this year they didn’t leave the Arctic because of a food shortage—quite the opposite. This was a banner year for lemmings, and the abundance of food ramped up Snowy Owl reproduction. Lemming populations fluctuate wildly, and in response to occasional population busts, it’s believed that some Snowy Owls breed only once in every three to five years. In average years, pairs produce an average of 3–5 chicks, and when food is abundant, as it was this year, they average 7–11 chicks in a clutch. When food is abundant, entire clutches often survive, resulting in a whole lot of owls on the tundra in fall. Owls are territorial in winter, and the birds most capable of driving other birds away get the biggest, most productive territories. Females are significantly larger than males, and adults are more capable of defending a territory than young birds, so the birds that have the hardest time getting territories and are driven south are the young males produced last year. Sure enough, most of the birds that have been identified in the US this year have been young males. As David Evans proved with banded Snowy Owls returning to the Duluth Harbor year after year, some owls do survive the round trip and make it again and again. But there are lots of dangers, especially in the urban and roadside areas where we’re most likely to see them, and many won’t make it.

I’m headed to Florida this week, so unless I manage to pick one out as we’re driving out of town or along the Interstate in Wisconsin, I’m probably not going to be seeing a Snowy Owl until at least February. Fortunately, that’s often the month with the most owl sightings in our neck of the woods, so it still looks good for my finding at least one this year. And that’s hardly going to be our last chance to see them. What with all the owls produced this year, those abundant lemmings have to be decreasing—a family with nine owlets and two parents consumes 1900–2600 lemmings just between May and September. So food shortages next year may drive Snowy Owls our way again. With luck they won’t skunk me two years in a row.

Black Skimmers!

2012-01-18T00:30:00.009-06:00

(Transcript of For the Birds for January 17, 2012 , sponsored by Vickie and Barry Wyatt. Thanks so much!)

Russ and I are headed to Florida for a few days next week, to visit our son and so I can help out with the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival. I love being in northern Minnesota in winter because I truly love chickadees and owls and all our other splendid winter birds, but every now and then it’s lovely to break away and see birds that never make their way north, and when there’s all the cold of winter with none of the snow, I must say I don’t mind wandering south for a bit.

The Florida coast is filled with a rainbow of spectacular birds, but of all the ones I enjoy down there, a few stand out as my favorites. And one of these is the Black Skimmer.

Every time I see skimmers, I’m blown away yet again by their bizarre bill. It’s brilliant orange and black, and the lower mandible is significantly longer than the upper, jutting out well beyond the upper bill in a wonderfully peculiar adaptation that allows them to capture fish in a unique way. Skimmers glide low over the water, usually on motionless wings, their lower mandible tip slicing surface of water. When the lower bill contacts a fish or other object, usually within just three centimeters of the surface, the upper mandible clamps down while the head and neck tuck downward, securing the fish, which is then turned and swallowed headfirst or carried crosswise in the bill to the nest. Skimmers do most of their fishing at low tide, and so may fish at any time of day or night.

From the side, the bill looks thick and bulgy,

but from straight ahead, it is surprisingly flat as a knife.

At hatching, a baby skimmer’s mandibles are equal in length, but by the time it fledges at 4 weeks, the lower bill is already nearly 1 cm longer than the upper.

This kind of unique adaptation seems like all a bird would need to set itself apart from other species, but skimmers have another unique feature. Their relatively large pupil constricts to a narrow vertical slit—something the eye of no other bird species can do. Scientists haven’t settled on the reason why skimmers have this cat-like feature, but it may be an adaptation to protect the retina from the glaring bright light of sun above and sparkling water below, or it may enhance their vision for nocturnal feeding. I personally never noticed this before I read about it in the Birds of North America Online, so I carefully went though all my close-up shots of Black Skimmers. The black eye is so difficult to see against their black head feathers that I had to tinker with the “Fill Light” feature of my photo editing software to fade the iris just enough to see that sure enough, the pupil is a slit. If you click on the next two photos, and then right-click them on Flickr.com, you can view them in a larger size to try to see this cool thing.

Except while fishing, Black Skimmers gather in large flocks. Like most birds, they usually face directly into the wind, which keeps their feathers aligned and unruffled.

A gathering of skimmers is a gorgeous study in black and white and orange whether they’re all standing still, all asleep, all preening, or all flying. Interestingly, they show what’s called contagious behaviors, and you can’t help but notice that if one skimmer is doing something, so are its neighbors, the behavior spreading through the whole flock.

The more I learn about Black Skimmers, the more fascinating I find them, and the more I want to capture each one of their features and behaviors. So whatever else I find myself doing in Florida, I know I’ll be taking photos of skimmers wherever they may be.

***

(Production of today’s For the Birds was made possible in part by a generous grant from Vickie and Barry Wyatt.)

Cynicism

2012-01-17T01:57:00.003-06:00

(Transcript of For the Birds for January 17, 2012 , sponsored by Vickie and Barry Wyatt. Thanks so much!)

Last week, researchers from Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama released their findings from a two-year study focusing on the diets of Tiger Sharks in the Gulf of Mexico. Their report made national news because it said the sharks are feeding in part on land-based birds such as woodpeckers, tanagers, meadowlarks, catbirds, kingbirds, and swallows. I wasn’t surprised—there are many records of birds in the stomachs of tiger sharks, and a great many of the millions of birds that migrate over the Gulf in spring and fall are killed in storms and, perhaps more than any other cause, by becoming disoriented by the lights on oil rigs and colliding with the rigs and with one another. Somehow people are so good at closing our eyes to what we don’t want to see that few had even considered how the lights on oil rigs set right in the midst of the largest swath of bird migration in North America would naturally be drawing large numbers of birds to their doom and the sharks’ delight.

Of course, this report will in no way affect the presence of the Gulf’s oil rigs. The best we could hope for would be that the oil companies would employ already existing radar technology to turn lights on when aircraft or ships are in the vicinity, but otherwise keep outside lighting off during nocturnal migration, ensuring human safety while conserving energy and protecting birds. But I have no expectation that the oil companies would ever consider such expensive technology without legal and public pressure, and no expectation in today’s political climate of that happening.

I find myself growing increasingly pessimistic about issues like this. But then I realize that I’ve seen many impossible dreams achieved in my lifetime. Lake Erie, pronounced dead in the early 1970s because its levels of eutrophication and pollution were thought to be beyond the point of no return, now teems with life. Rivers that were literally afire then now have nesting Bald Eagles along their shores. Every California Condor in existence was taken into captivity in 1987, most hving dangerous levels of lead in their blood and body tissues. At that time the world’s entire population of condors numbered in the 20s; now there are almost 400, over 180 flying wild and free. Snorts of derision from naysayers even greeted a young president’s dream that we would one day send a man to the moon and bring him home safely.

If optimism must be tempered with realism in order to make dreams achievable, pessimism must be tempered with realism to dream at all. Working together, optimists and pessimist accomplish the impossible. Rick Bayan defined the word “cynic” in The Cynic’s Dictionary as “an idealist whose rose-colored glasses have been removed, snapped in two and stomped into the ground, immediately improving his vision.” An optimist’s rose-colored glasses do indeed cast a pretty haze over the hard brilliance of reality. A pessimist’s glasses cast a dull gray haze over everything. But only a cynic would stomp either of those glasses to the ground, relegating himself to the dark exile of self-imposed blindness. Cynicism is fundamentally lazy. If one decides that it’s pointless to screw in a light bulb, one remains in the dark forever.

So I’ll keep plugging away, trying to make people aware of the plight of birds migrating over the Gulf and trying to get optimists and pessimists to work together to find realistic solutions. My rose-colored glasses may sometimes dim to gray, but succumbing to cynicism would take away hope—that thing with feathers that perches in my soul and keeps my eyes and heart open to beauty and my responsibilities toward the birds I love.

***

Production of today’s For the Birds was made possible in part by a generous grant from Vickie and Barry Wyatt.

Moments That Take Our Breath Away

2012-01-16T01:14:00.005-06:00

(Transcript of For the Birds for January 16, 2012, sponsored by Vickie and Barry Wyatt. Thanks so much!)

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” Last week someone posted that quote on Facebook. The words deeply resonated with me, and apparently with a lot of my birding friends, who instantly pressed the facebook “Like” button. I think over a lifetime, we who spend time in nature are given more opportunities for having our breath taken away than many people are. Whether we’re blown away by a view of the Grand Canyon, a spectacular sunrise, a particularly brilliant and flowing display of northern lights, a sudden glimpse of a Respendent Quetzal, or a chickadee alighting on our finger, the more time we spend in nature, the more we get to experience magical moments.

Of course, it’s hardly as if birdwatching is the only thing in my life that has given me genuinely breathtaking moments. If I could retrieve from memory every single moment that took my breath away, the list would include lots of moments not remotely connected to birds, such as the moment the boy I loved with all my heart, who became my husband, first told me he loved me at a Chicago Cubs game; the moment I first held each of my newborn babies; moments when I witnessed some of my children’s firsts; the moment I made a sudden and unexpected breakthrough with a student struggling with math; and the moment I opened an email from a former student who recounted what I meant to her—those have been among the most sublime, thrilling moments in my life.

But any list itemizing my breathtaking moments would include a lot connected with birds. One happened when I was seven or eight. My grandpa had told me that if I practiced whistling really hard, I could get a cardinal to answer. I tried and tried, and one morning when I was in my bedroom trying to match the song of a cardinal down the block, suddenly he flew right to the maple branch brushing against my window, peeked in at me, and sang back at me. “Breathtaking” is a lame and clichéd word for the joy I felt at that unexpected moment, but it was the literal truth.

Another magical moment came when I was birding in Madison on December 3, 1977, and whistled in my lifer Pine Grosbeak. If seeing him weren’t thrilling enough, I put out my bare hand, and he alighted right on my finger and looked into my eyes. He flew to a nearby branch within a second or so, but my heart thumped at top speed for a long time after.

When I was walking in downtown Los Angeles in 1994, I heard some White-throated Swifts overhead and wheeled to a stop to look at them with my binoculars. A homeless man who’d been lying on a bench under some newspapers asked what I was looking at. I answered, “White-throated Swifts!” He said, “Huh?” so I handed him my binoculars. He looked up with a confused expression, but the moment he caught sight of the birds, his face broke into a delighted smile, and I could feel my heart leap at the sudden connection.

Birding is filled with magical moments—some between us and a bird, and some between us and another human being because of birds. That's why the quote “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away” so resonates with me and other birders. I don’t think it’s fair to say that the measure of the life of a birder is in any way better than the measure of the life of anyone else, but awareness of birds sure provides lots of opportunities to experience moments that take our breath away.

***

When I read the quote, “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away,” on Facebook, it was unattributed, and so I tried to track it down. It wasn’t in my Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations—my copy was copyrighted 1980—so I tried a Google search. Many sources attributed it to Maya Angelou, but none with an actual citation to a poem, speech, or anything. Some attributed it to George Carlin, but Snopes.com debunked that. Others attributed it to a minister, but from what I could tell, it was being quoted from before he used it, so he apparently worked it into an essay without indicating it was from someone else. The most compelling information I could find was that it was written by a Canadian man who wrote it for a greeting card for Carlton Cards in the mid-1970s. I wrote an email to Carlton Cards asking about it, and will post any response they send.

Meanwhile, one of my friends posted a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln that may be the original inspiration for this quote: “And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.” Unfortunately, so far I cannot find the citation, so don’t know whether this came from Lincoln’s words in a speech, a letter to someone, or what. Let me know if you have a citation for it, or any other information about the first quote I used.

(Production of today’s For the Birds was made possible in part by a generous grant from Vickie and Barry Wyatt.)

Ryan Brady and the oldest known Northern Shrike

2012-01-11T22:59:00.006-06:00

Transcript of For the Birds for January 12, 2012.

My friend Ryan Brady is one of my favorite people, combining superb birding skills, depth and breadth of ornithological expertise, a commitment to conservation and education, and engaging enthusiasm. Ryan is the bird monitoring coordinator for the Wisconsin Bird Conservation Initiative. This week, I was elated to read one of his facebook posts starting, “The oldest known Northern Shrike in North America lives on!” He was reporting about a Northern Shrike that he’d banded in 2006 as part of a research project he does in conjunction with Northland College. This shrike has returned to Ashland for seven years now. She’s already on the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center Bird Banding Laboratory’s website as the longevity record holder for Northern Shrikes. Other shrikes may be older, but we can’t know without tracking banded birds.

I had to get more information about something this cool, so I called Ryan. Since 2005, he’s color-banded more than 100 Northern Shrikes, giving each a unique combination of color bands which has allowed him to keep track of individuals while they’re in his neck of the woods in winter. This project is the only study of Northern Shrikes currently taking place in the United States. Ryan told me that on March 17, 2006 he caught and banded the record-setting female, who was already an adult. It was impossible to know how old she was at that point, but she must have hatched in the summer of 2004 or earlier. Ryan put a regular US Fish and Wildlife Service aluminum band above a dark blue color band on her right leg and a white color band on her left leg.

Every year since then she’s returned to the same winter territory around the Ashland airport. Most years he finds her throughout the season in the open habitat around the airport.

For two winters he conducted a radio telemetry study, tracking the movements of 11 individual shrikes. He tracked this female’s movements in January and February of 2009, a year when rodent populations were very low. Ryan found her in town a lot, as much as three miles from the airport. She was presumably taking backyard birds because 2009 happened to be a banner year for siskins and crossbills. The next year, the rodent population was back up and she was back spending all her time on her territory by the airport. The 11 shrikes he tracked in that telemetry study held territories averaging about 450 hectares, which is about 1100 acres, or 1.75 square miles. The smallest territory was only about 30 hectares. This female’s territory in 2009 was by far the hugest, about 1600 hectares.

This week Ryan also had another marked bird return—an adult male bird that he’d banded in April 2009 who is now 3 and a half years old. This is older than the shrike in second place on the Patuxent longevity webpage. Shrikes show strong site fidelity, but when we see a shrike in the same place year after year, we can never be certain that it’s the same individual unless it’s banded, because the previous year’s bird may have died or for some other reason not returned, only to have the available habitat occupied by a new bird.

Ryan Brady is going to be the Friday night speaker at the Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival on February 17, talking about his shrike project and the record-breaking female. He’ll be showing up-close-and-personal photos of many of the shrikes he’s worked with as he discusses how he ages and sexes them and what he’s learned about winter site fidelity, home range size, physiology, and more. The Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival always has interesting speakers and great field trips, but this one may be the best yet.

Review: The Big Year on DVD

2012-01-11T08:04:00.002-06:00

Last Friday I got a preview copy of The Big Year on DVD, with both the theatrical release version and an extended version. My review is on the ABA Blog.

Evening Grosbeaks: What Is Happening with Them?

2012-01-09T10:25:00.003-06:00

(Transcripts of For the Birds for January 9 and January 10, 2012)

When I moved to Duluth in 1981, Evening Grosbeaks were immediately woven into the fabric of my daily life. We heard them in our box elders as we lugged boxes into our new house and they were the first species to visit our feeders. Their calls provided background sound indoors and out. Their numbers were down in summer, up in winter, and huge during spring and fall migrations, but season after season, year after year throughout the 80s, Evening Grosbeaks were in my yard. I had better luck with them than many people because my box elder trees drew in flocks flying overhead, but just about anyone in Duluth with platform feeders offering sunflower seeds had Evening Grosbeaks back then.

By the early 90s, grosbeak numbers seemed to be declining. I was very concerned, but thought it was part of a disturbing pattern in Duluth—during this same period, my neighborhood lost all of our nesting Tree Swallows, Red-eyed Vireos, and Yellow Warblers, and the huge waves of migrating warblers and thrushes in my backyard had dwindled. Friends of mine who lived in Duluth for several decades before I did also noticed the disappearance of local nesting species then—birds which have not returned. Evening Grosbeaks were counted on every single Christmas Bird Count from the start in 1979 until 2002, when not one appeared. There were a handful in the following years, but 2011 has now been the third year in a row that they weren’t found at all on Duluth’s Christmas Bird Count. The pattern of Christmas Bird Count data for all of Minnesota shows a very steep climb in Evening Grosbeak numbers peaking in the mid-60s.

The pattern of data for Wisconsin Christmas Bird Counts shows the same steep peak, only in the early 70s.

In Michigan, where Christmas Bird Counts have a longer history, the graph peak is more sustained, from the early 60s through late 70s, but shows that same troubling decline since then.

Some birders and ornithologists dismiss the current, widespread, and huge decline of grosbeaks in much of their former range with the argument that their former abundance may have been nothing more than an historical blip. The Christmas Bird Count patterns do imply that Evening Grosbeak numbers were quite low before the 1950s and 60s in these three states, but I suspect that’s due to the low participation before that time, particularly in the northern reaches of these three states, where the grosbeaks were most often found. The Christmas Bird Count began in 1900, but had very few participants for decades, and provides no information whatsoever for the 1800s or earlier.

Breeding Bird Survey numbers in all three states have declined significantly since the 1960s, when the survey began—sadly, this survey can’t provide any information from before then.

It is interesting to speculate about a possible population cycle that lasts many decades, or about an inexplicable historical blip, but the simplest explanation for the drop in Evening Grosbeaks numbers in the Great Lakes region in the past two decades, the explanation Occam’s razor would ask us to consider first, is that the population actually has declined, and is a serious conservation issue that deserves serious study.

***
Yesterday I mentioned that 2011 was the third year in a row that not a single Evening Grosbeak was found during Duluth’s Christmas Bird Count. Before 2009, the only other year in our count history that no Evening Grosbeaks were found was 2002.

No one understands why Evening Grosbeaks underwent a huge decline since the late 1980s to the point where they’ve disappeared altogether from many areas. I had a flock of about 16 in my neighborhood every day for about six weeks this summer, including adults feeding young birds, but this group was the only one I’ve had in years, and I haven’t seen one since my group left on September 15.

It’s reassuring to seek out proof that things aren’t as bad as they seem, and some birders and ornithologists have argued that the large numbers of Evening Grosbeaks in the eastern half of the continent from the 1950s through the 80s were simply an historic aberration. Without a time machine, it’s impossible to know the truth about what their numbers were during the 1700s and 1800s, much less further back in time. According to the species account written by Scott Gillihan and Bruce Byers in the Birds of North America, the Evening Grosbeak “at least mid-1800s was considered uncommon to rare east of Rockies and especially east of Mississippi River, although reported as ‘not uncommon’ winter visitor in Wisconsin in mid-1800s and ‘common’ in n. Illinois during winter in 1870s.”

I’m sure Native Americans were aware of Evening Grosbeaks before any record was made of them in written English. Indeed, the Ojibwe name for them, as transcribed by Henry Schoolcraft in 1823, was “Paushkundamo,” derived from their word for breaking something such as a cherry or berry, referring to the grosbeak’s style of eating. Schoolcraft also provided the first record ornithologists have of the existence of the species, a grosbeak shot with an arrow by a child in Sault Ste. Marie on April 7, 1823, when the bird could have been either a resident or a migrant. (See T.S. Roberts The Birds of Minnesota.) This and the fact that local native people had a word for this bird don’t prove that the species was regularly found in Michigan through earlier times, but it is consistent with that probability. A comprehensive study of the species, published in 1940 by James Baillie, mapped 82 summer records which formed an almost continuous belt in the US and Canada from southeastern Manitoba through eastern Ontario, concentrated mainly in the Great Lakes. Later expansion east of that band was attributed to plantings of box elder, the seeds of which are one of the grosbeak’s preferred food sources.

Until feeding birds sunflower seeds became a common hobby, I don’t think most people living among them would particularly have noticed Evening Grosbeaks. They are secretive nesters and have no song associated with courtship or territory. They usually stay within the branches of trees, eating a variety of seeds and fruits. Adults are pretty much entirely vegetarians—people maintaining non-breeding Evening Grosbeaks in captivity, even over a two-year period, found that they did not eat any insects offered to them—but they are known to feed their growing chicks a variety of insects including spruce budworms. Whether losses of grosbeaks are related to controls used against this forest pest is not known.

The species is incredibly difficult to study, both because it’s so secretive during nesting and because it wanders so very widely. But despite the difficulties a solid study of grosbeak population trends poses, it seems imperative to start trying to tease out what has happened and what is happening now to its population. If its dwindling numbers are indeed reflective of a problem, it’s important to figure that out while there’s still time to turn things around for this beautiful bird.

Some planning for my Conservation Big Year

2011-12-31T14:14:00.003-06:00

I put together a list of resources I'm going to be using to plan out my Conservation Big Year, and posted it on the project blog here.

My Year in Review

2011-12-30T09:27:00.003-06:00

(Transcript of today's "For the Birds"))

New Year’s Eve can be fraught with disappointment if we focus on all the things we didn’t accomplish in the past year or if we get lost in unrealistic expectations for the coming year. One of the best things about being a birdwatcher is that at the end of every year, I get to go over all the wonderful birds I saw that year. Now that I’m photographing birds as I watch them, my pictures help me relive many of the best moments of the year.

I did plenty of travel this year, but for the most part it was to talk about birds, not to look at them. In January, I was a keynote speaker at the Space Coast birding festival in Florida, where I got my best photos of Roseate Spoonbills and Florida Scrub-Jays ever,

and saw a Crested Caracara carrying sticks and working on a nest.

In March, I spent some time in Indianapolis and in Louisville, Kentucky, adding to my photos of Carolina Chickadees and fox squirrels.

A huge flock of Bohemian Waxwings visited my backyard in April, giving me an amazing photo op.

In April I was a speaker at the Cleveland Metroparks bird festival. I saw lots of cool birds, and thanks to a bird-banding program, also got my first photos ever of a male chickadee’s cloacal protuberance.

In May I saw plenty of cool northern Wisconsin birds during the Elderhostel class I teach each year in Eagle River, and then went to see breeding Kirtland’s Warblers in Michigan.

I got a photo of a female chickadee’s brood patch in June, during another bird-banding program at a birding week at Hunt Hill Audubon Center in Sarona, Wisconsin.

On August 4, a group of Evening Grosbeaks descended upon our yard and remained for six weeks. Grosbeaks were an everyday bird back in our first years of living in Duluth, when our children were little, and for a flock of about 16 to visit us every day gave us a lovely distraction and moments of grace right when Russ was recovering from surgery.

In September I spent time in Missouri, photographing Eurasian Tree Sparrows in my good friend Susan’s yard.

Then she and I headed to the Ozarks, where I finally got a focused photo of a Yellow-billed Cuckoo.

In October I attended a meeting in Philadelphia where I got to visit the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and see and photograph specimens of Labrador Duck, Eskimo Curlew, Great Auk, Passenger Pigeon, and Carolina Parakeet—species that are all extinct.

Then, in November, I spent my birthday in the Grand Canyon, searching for a bird I’ve been yearning to see since I started birding—a bird that was so close to the edge of extinction in 1987 that every single individual had to be brought into captivity and treated for lead poisoning, and a captive breeding program became necessary before birds could at last be restored to the wild. Watching eight individual California Condors living free, flying high in the sky, was an utterly thrilling birthday gift that made 2011 one of the best years of my life.

In January, Russ and I are headed to Texas and Florida for a couple of weeks. I don’t have a lot of travel planned for the year, but I’ll be plotting out how to do a Conservation Big Year in 2013, trying to see every bird on the American Bird Conservancy’s watch list. Even while I’m planning ahead, I’ll be watching and photographing the birds in my daily life. Whatever 2012 may bring, I’ll be spending next New Year’s Eve looking over lots more photos of lots more birds—my happy way of keeping track of the passage of time.

How the Raven Saved Christmas

2011-12-22T09:58:00.003-06:00

(I wrote this story back in the 80s for my own children. Some people have recorded it and listen to it every year! If you listen to the recording, notice how beautiful Lang Elliott's bird sound recordings are! It will be on tomorrow's podcast)

Once upon a time, many many Christmases ago, there was a year when no snow fell in the North Woods.

Grownups were happy because driving was safe, they didn’t have to shovel, their cars didn’t get gunked up with road salt, and their kids couldn’t track snow all over the floors.

But the children were sad because they knew that Santa needs snow to land his sleigh. And the children also knew that North Woods snow is the most special snow in the world. Snow from Lake Superior December squalls has magical properties. It’s so cold, and sticks so well, that if Santa dusts his sleigh runners with it, it lasts all through his trip, so he can land in southern cities where snow never falls. Children throughout much of the United States and Mexico depend on this magical snow. What would happen without it?

Two days before Christmas Santa listened to his weather radio and sighed. It was 50 degrees in Duluth, and the next day, Christmas Eve, was supposed to be even warmer! How could he get his presents to all the good little children who believed in him?

Just then there came a rapping, came a tapping at his chamber door, and in walked an enormous Raven. Santa was startled, but the Raven said, “If you can’t ride in your sleigh this year, why don’t you ride on my back?” Santa climbed on, and sure enough, the Raven took off and flew with him high over the North Pole. They circled twice and landed easy as pie. Santa was delighted!

Then they tried it with Santa’s pack on his back, but that was just too heavy for the Raven to manage. Santa asked, “Do you think your raven friends could help carry the presents?” But the Raven sadly shook her head. “Most ravens think they’re too grown up for Santa Claus. And I’m afraid hawks and eagles are the same way.”

Then she had an idea. “Maybe our little brothers the crows can help!” She flew off and brought back a team of twelve glossy crows, all cawing with excitement. They each picked up a bundle of toys in their beaks and took off on a practice flight in a wide circle over the pole. But one of them spied a Snowy Owl sitting on a snow bank, and instantly dropped to the ground to scold it. Soon all the crows were down, every one of them yelling his head off at the owl instead of carrying presents. The Raven shrugged. “I guess crows can’t do the job. They’re bound to see an owl somewhere on Christmas Eve, and they won’t be able to stop themselves from mobbing it.”

Santa and the Raven tried Blue Jays next. They were small, but tough and wiry, and managed to carry big sacks of presents in their beaks. They were all so proud to be helping Santa that they shouted with glee. But the moment they opened their beaks, the packages fell to the ground. They tried again and again, but no matter how hard they tried, they just couldn’t keep their mouths shut, and Santa was worried that some of the fragile presents would break if they kept on dropping them.

Then they tried pelicans. But pelicans need a lot of food, and every time they got hungry they forgot that their pouches were filled with presents, not fish, and they swallowed them!

Snowbirds wanted to help, but they were too little.

Next the Raven asked some Willow Ptarmigans, Arctic cousins of our own Ruffed Grouse, but their wings only work well for short distances.

Santa was starting to believe this really would be a Christmas without presents when the Raven suddenly noticed a Tundra Swan watching them from the snow. She shyly offered the services of herself and her family.

And that is how it came to be that one Christmas long, long ago, children peeking out of their windows at midnight spotted Santa Claus riding on the back of a beautiful and kind Raven, followed by eight graceful swans in a V, each with a sack full of presents tied around its neck for all the good little children who really believed in the spirit of giving.

Popularizing Wildlife

2011-12-21T10:28:00.004-06:00

Now that I'm 60, occasionally this blog will be written by a guest blogger, the Grouchy Geezer. This is the transcript of tomorrow's For the Birds.

Ever since I started using the Internet in the 90s, people have been uploading and sharing photos and videos of animals. Many show wild baby animals in zoos or rehab facilities. Naturally, these little creatures are adorable, and the videos do inspire people to donate to important and underfunded organizations, but in my mind it’s tragic that most people’s only understanding of baby sloths comes from watching them eating from baby bottles, and their only understanding of baby pandas comes from watching a tiny baby sneezing or doing other cute things in a big concrete and metal enclosure.

In the past month alone, I bet at least 100 people have sent me links to YouTube owl videos. There seem to be two kinds of popular ones. Most show captive owls in unnatural settings doing what appear to be cute things—pouncing on a moving light the way cats pounce on laser pointers, preening, turning or moving their head side to side in a funky way, fluffing up, and things like that. Many of these videos show owls from other continents, and most were made in other countries. The second kind of video shows owls in what appear to be wild settings, usually in flight or hunting. One really popular one shows an Eagle Owl flying directly toward the camera. This owl appears to me to be a captive bird trained to fly in for food, though you can’t see what is enticing it behind the camera. If you look closely in many of the others, of actual wild birds, you see that their prey animal isn’t wild, but some hapless gerbil or pet store mouse that has been tossed out to be ripped apart in a photo op.

Our human world has grown ever and ever more disconnected from the natural world. In one respect, I don’t think this is a bad thing. Thoreau was absolutely right that in wildness is the preservation of the world, but in the long run, concentrating our ever burgeoning numbers of humans into cities is the only way we can possibly save the ever dwindling pockets of natural habitat. So in a very real sense, in cities is the preservation of wildness. That’s the very reason Russ and I chose to live in a settled neighborhood of Duluth rather than carving our own little piece of heaven out of the surrounding natural habitat.

So I both understand and appreciate that more and more people are distanced from wildness. But there is excellent nature to be observed even in densely populated cities—my list of birds seen in the Chicago area alone includes a couple dozen species of warblers and a few owls, including a Snowy Owl that flew above my head as Russ and I walked along Lake Shore Drive. And my own backyard list of birds includes 175 species. But fewer and fewer people seem to notice the wild animals in their immediate surroundings except to complain about them or to try to tame them. And more and more people expect their encounters with animals to be accompanied by a soundtrack and edited to be more exciting or cute, and completely, and artificially, anthropomorphized. Interest in parrots involves the birds learning human speech, not how they communicate within their family and flocks. Few people would be interested in learning about manakin lekking, either on a video or by traveling to the right habitat in the tropics, but millions will click on a YouTube video showing a bird (few seem to care what species it is) doing what’s hyped as a Michael Jackson Moon Walk. Few people realize or care that owls have 14 neck vertebrae—twice as many as we have—and that their eyes are fixed in the sockets, but millions will click on a YouTube video showing an owl moving its head in what appears to be a comical way.

I’m also frustrated that more and more photos and videos of wild animals are based on unethical and potentially dangerous techniques on the part of the photographers. Feeding them rodents from pet shops habituates owls to people, which can be very dangerous for them when they approach people expecting a meal. It also exposes the birds to salmonella. And many photographers don’t even bother to lug their equipment far from their cars, so they increase the danger by feeding these birds too close to roadsides.

Over my lifetime, I’ve watched as children and adults in our culture have grown more sexualized, more violent, and more vain. When I watch TV ads for nature programming, the emphasis is always on momentary acts of mating and killing prey, or on animated or excessively edited features distorting reality to give animals an artificial cuteness or strangeness, as if their natural features aren’t enough. Sex, violence, and artificial physical enhancements are our obsessions, not the rich panoply of natural behaviors and natural looks that reflect real human beings and real animals. Something valuable is being lost right before our eyes.

Archimedes

2011-12-21T07:09:00.003-06:00

(Transcript of today's For the Birds. In the recording, you'll hear Lang Elliott's recording of an Eastern Screech-Owl trill at the start and finish. The owl calling in the background throughout the program is Archimedes.)

For the past 11-½ years, I’ve lived with an Eastern Screech-Owl named Archimedes. When he was a tiny chick, some children found him in an Ohio backyard, lying still on the grass. They thought he was dead—he had no feathers, was covered with oozing scabs and puncture wounds, and was ice cold. They picked him up with a tissue to throw him out, but he wiggled, so their parents brought him to a wildlife clinic.

Normally, wildlife clinics leave the tending and feeding of owl chicks to adult education owls of the same species. Adult owls have a very well developed nurturing capacity, and being raised by their own species eliminates the possibility of owlets becoming imprinted on humans. But Archimedes had a blood infection that required intravenous medication, he was emaciated so needed to be tube-fed and then handfed a liquefied diet, and needed antibiotic salves to treat infections on his skin, which led to him becoming imprinted.

After he was fully recovered, Archimedes quickly learned to hunt, but during the two times he was released, he kept approaching and alighting on people, even after the rehabbers tried aversion therapy, and so finally he was returned to captivity permanently. I have permits from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to keep one owl as an education bird, and had the great good fortune to acquire this perfect little bird. He and I are very bonded. Owls mate for life, and a mated pair and their chicks often preen one another. This allopreening reinforces their family bonds. I reinforce my bond with Archimedes by preening his feathers and nuzzling him, and allowing him to preen my hair and eyebrows.

Because Archimedes is imprinted and because he’s so bonded to me, he’s very comfortable doing programs, even in crowded, noisy circumstances. He’s calmly dealt with Cub Scout pack meetings in echoing gymnasiums, all-school assembly presentations on brightly lit stages, and owl talks at book signings in chaotic shopping malls. People often comment about how well trained he is, but I’ve never trained him to do anything, and don’t like the thought of training a wild bird to do tricks. I’m actually showing a screech owl’s natural behavior.

Most owls spend their daytime sitting quietly. Like cats, they are awake whenever they feel like it, day or night, but are specially adapted for nocturnal hunting, and don’t need to be active in daytime. When many songbirds, including crows, jays, and robins, see an owl, they attack, so screech owls usually spend their day inside an abandoned woodpecker hole or Wood Duck box. They can pop their head out to soak in the sun, but when even a chickadee notices them, they pop their head back inside. When Archimedes first came home with me, he spent his days inside a Wood Duck house in his big flight cage, but after a month or so, as he grew more comfortable here, he started sitting on open perches and hasn’t retreated into his box since except once when he was sick.

So when he and I are doing programs, it’s natural for him to sit quietly on my gloved hand. He’s used to and comfortable hearing my voice, and if I sense him getting nervous, I just preen him a bit, which instantly calms him thanks to the natural behavior of allopreening. During programs, Archimedes is simply demonstrating how normal owls behave. He is certainly adorable, but more and more I’m growing uncomfortable with how many people exclaim that he’s as cute as owls they’ve seen on YouTube. Tomorrow I’ll explain why these videos make me so uncomfortable.

BirdWatching's Field of View blog: my first post!

2011-12-15T12:49:00.004-06:00

I've recently had the great honor of being invited to be a columnist for BirdWatching! This is thrilling, plus I've also been asked to write occasionally for the magazine's Field of View blog. This is my first entry, about feeding mealworms to chickadees in winter.

Embarrassingly shameless self-promotion of my books

2011-12-15T11:46:00.007-06:00

I don't usually market my own stuff—it seems somehow too forward—and I have to charge cover price plus shipping, so buying from a local bookstore or Amazon is much more reasonable for anyone on the kind of budget I'm always on. But several people have asked how to get autographed copies of this or that so here goes. Books are listed in order of when they were published, starting with the newest. Shipping details are at the bottom. I add a nickel to the cover price to make it easier for me to deal with, and then cover MN state taxes myself.

$20

Twelve Owls came out this fall. It has a long introduction talking about owl basics (including how their bodies are specialized for nighttime hunting) and then has twelve separate entries about the twelve owls that have been recorded in Minnesota. It looks like a children's book, but is meatier than most—my target audience was adults, but as always I envision my junior high students reading my work—that's my technique for making my writing accessible. Betsy Bowen is a well-known and very popular Minnesota artist.

$15

I wrote The Bird Watching Answer Book while I was working at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and everything in it was vetted by Lab scientists. I tried to be comprehensive, including answers to questions I've been asked over my decades of blathering on about birds. I specifically targeted people in various bird clubs who need quick access to answers when they're dealing with people calling in with questions. Pedro Fernandes illustrated this. He chose my favorite birds, chickadees, and my own binoculars for the cover illustration.

$20

101 Ways to Help Birds is my Rachel Carson book. I wrote it when I was exactly the age she was while composing Silent Spring, and my working title was Resounding Spring because the book was my effort to show people how just about everything we do in our lives affects the environment that we share with birds, and what we can do to prevent a silent spring. I tried to make it as comprehensive as possible—there are virtually no conservation issues I've read about since the book was published in 2006 that aren't covered in the book. Really.

101 Ways to Help Birds was also awarded the Stephen T. Colbert Award for the Literary Excellence (Really!). Not that Stephen T. Colbert is even remotely aware of my existence. But his I Am America (And So Can You!) included stickers and said anyone who bought the book was free to put them on any book that "you feel embodies the values of the Colbert Nation." So why not?

$18

Sharing the Wonder of Kids is rather dated—it was published in 1997, as its paltry references to "the World Wide Web" show. But it is based on my decades of personal experience teaching kids about birds, and in particular has a lot about managing field trips and sharing a spotting scope among a lot of people that are still extremely useful. This book also has a LOT about bird biology, and is even why some librarians have called me "the Dr. Ruth of ornithology." It won the National Outdoor Book Award. My friend Dudley Edmondson took the cover photograph, which includes my kids and some of their friends. I should point out that when the photo was taken, we were looking at my husband Russ, who was standing on a bridge above us. After the shot, Max, who had the spotting scope cranked up to 60 power, said, "Great nose hairs, Russ!" This is also the only bird book in the world with an endorsement from humorist Dave Barry on the cover. He wrote, "I heartily endorse this book because the author once sent me a tapeworm that came from a bird." Honest.

$20

For the Birds: An Uncommon Guide, was written at the request of the publisher back in 1993, based on radio scripts from "For the Birds," which at the time had been on the air for 7 years. (It's now been on for 25.) It includes 365 short essays, each with a sidebar, some about conservation, some stories about various birds I was living with, had rehabbed, or had encountered while birding. Some people genuinely love this book: at a recent event, a couple came up holding their first edition (it's now in a 5th printing) which they'd had to have rebound.

So how do you get a copy? NO GUARANTEES THAT IT WILL ARRIVE IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS! It's cheapest to get it from Amazon, B&N, or your local bookstore. If you want a personalized copy or want me to get more money from the sale and don't mind spending the extra for shipping and a padded envelope*, send me an email with "Book Purchase" as the subject line, and include your address and how you want the book signed. Verify that you know how obscenely expensive it is to order from me. I'll email you back my address, where to send the money—you can send a personal check or money order. I'll get the book into the mail ASAP, but if I'm gone for this or that, it could be a few days, but you'll know from my email. I'll trust you to get the money to me.

*I usually ship "Media Rate," and charge $5 for the first book (I have to pay for those padded envelopes, too!) and $2 each for books over that. (i.e.--add $5 if you order 1 book, $7 if you order 2, $9 if you order 3. See what I mean? It's cheaper to order from Amazon.)

Water conservation trial in Texas

2011-12-14T02:09:00.003-06:00

Transcript of today's For the Birds

Tom Stehn monitored Whooping Cranes at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge for 29 years, until he retired last year. He is widely known as the authority on the wintering flock, the only self-sustaining, natural population of Whooping Cranes in the universe. I wrote about these Whooping Cranes in my book 101 Ways to Help Birds, in the section about why conserving water is so critical for birds. Tom Stehn was the authority I quoted.

These Whooping Cranes breed in Wood Buffalo National Park in Alberta. They mate for life and usually raise a single chick each year. Even with massive work by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and Environment Canada, these wild birds never spread beyond their traditional breeding and wintering areas, because they learn their migration route from their parents.

Most years it’s not too hard to keep track of wintering Whooping Cranes with aerial censuses. Pairs and families stay pretty centered on their territories, feeding on blue crabs in the more marshy areas of the estuary. Blue crabs can’t survive when the water gets too salty, and this year’s drought in Texas is one of the worst on record. Without the fresh water supplied by the rivers that empty into the estuary, the crabs decline, and the cranes must search harder for food. Starvation may take some, but before they succumb, they tend to wander in search of food. Birds on territory know where all the hazards are. When they wander off these havens, they’re more likely to be killed by accidents or predators. A severe drought in 2008-09 led to the deaths of at least 23 cranes—over 8 percent of their entire population at the time.

Because of this year’s record-setting drought, people in Texas have been fighting over the limited water supplies. A coalition of environmentalists, businesses, and local governments called The Aransas Project is suing the state of Texas, contending that its regulation of water withdrawals from the San Antonio and Guadalupe Rivers is detrimental to the health of the bay, which is the economic lifeblood of the area. The suit claims that the water policy during that 2008 drought caused the deaths of endangered Whooping Cranes. The case is in federal court because it involves the federal Endangered Species Act. Establishing a violation of the act requires proof that an endangered animal was killed and that the defendant, in this case the State of Texas and their water management system, caused the death.

The case was heard last week in Corpus Christi. Both the Aransas Project and the state had wanted to subpoena Tom Stehn, but the US Fish and Wildlife Service has rules preventing employees from testifying. But because his work was central to the case, the judge issued a subpoena, and last Tuesday Tom Stehn appeared before the court. He said that probably more than 23 birds died in the 2008 drought, because he did not have an accurate count of the sub adults. Whooping Cranes that are one to four years old don’t defend a territory, and they can wander extensively around the bay. But he said his number was an accurate minimum. The judge said, “I don't know how on Earth you could figure out what is going on with an endangered species without doing it the way he is.” Attorneys on both sides had accidentally misstated Stehn’s name as Mr. Crane, and the judge herself said, “This is the only human on Earth who has been counting these birds annually in this area. He is ‘Mr. Crane.'”

She’s expected to make a ruling soon on whether the state must change its policy to allow more freshwater to remain in the San Antonio and Guadalupe Rivers. It’s not going to be easy to balance the needs of everyone. As the judge asked, “Do you take from the farmers to give to the whooping cranes?” Ultimately, all of us are going to have to be better about water conservation.

Empathy

2011-12-09T01:29:00.004-06:00

Wednesday, the journal Science published a fascinating study by researchers from the University of Chicago demonstrating that rats show empathy toward other rats. In their experiments, Peggy Mason, Jean Decety, and Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal put rats inside an enclosure, trapping some of them in a tube trap which could only be opened from the outside. As soon as a free rat figured out the mechanism, it released the trapped ones. And after it had figured out how to open the trap, every time it saw trapped rats, it released them. These rats never opened the trap unless a real, live rat was trapped inside. They couldn’t be tricked by stuffed ones. This was represented as the first documented scientific experiment proving that rats display a kind of empathy toward other rats.

The results of this experiment didn’t surprise me. There are many documented cases of jays and crows providing food for injured or sick birds from their neighborhood flock. Some scientists go through all kinds of intellectual contortions to avoid attributing emotions to animals, explaining behaviors that appear empathetic are merely programmed behaviors that help ensure that the animal’s genes survive, sometimes because local populations include related animals, and also because if this behavior is a found in a population, each animal that helps another can expect reciprocal kindness. But we could explain human empathy exactly the same way. It is certainly unscientific to attribute human characteristics to birds, but it’s equally unscientific to claim that a human characteristic cannot be found in any animals. Little by little, we tease out scientific evidence that we share more than biochemistry and a whole lot of our DNA with other animals. One day, I suspect that people will look back on our belief that humans are entirely apart from other animals with the same bemusement that we look back on people for believing the earth is at the center of the universe.

I used to have a licensed education Blue Jay named Sneakers. For a while when I was rehabbing, I also had a jay named BJ. The two of them lived in adjacent cages, and were very responsive to one another. I never did a genetic test to determine the sex of either bird, and neither of them showed any courtship or nesting behaviors, but they seemed to be best of friends. One day when I went into the room where I kept them, I found that Sneakers had managed to break out of her cage. BJ’s cage door was securely fastened, but Sneakers was stuffing mealworms through the bars straight into BJ’s mouth. I presume Sneakers had eaten a bunch herself first, but I was struck by her generous impulse to feed her buddy. Sneakers was also very devoted to me, and learned to say “hi,” and “c’mon” in my voice. The first time she talked that we know of, I’d been out of town for a couple of days, and Russ heard her say “hi,” and thought I was home early. Once in a while she’d talk in front of little kids, and sometimes she talked when it was just the two of us, but she did most of her talking when I wasn’t home. I started to suspect she was imitating my voice when she missed me. If she couldn’t see me, she could at least hear my voice. BJ wasn’t the least bit bonded to me, and never said a word. That is, not until Sneakers died. Suddenly, out of the clear blue sky, BJ started saying “Hi,” and “C’mon,” sounding exactly like Sneakers. I think it was how BJ could hear Sneaker’s voice.

I’m not surprised that scientists are detecting empathy in animals, and based on Sneakers and BJ, and on various dogs and cats I’ve had in my life, I think grief is another emotion we share with our fellow creatures. Considering how poorly we communicate with and demonstrate empathy toward our own species, I don’t know how we’ll ever learn to communicate with animals, or come to any real understanding of our fellow travelers on this planet. But little by little we’re learning.

Field Guides, Part 2 (The two I don't recommend)

2011-12-06T09:37:00.014-06:00

Transcript of tomorrow's For the Birds.

Magnolia Warbler (One of the many common Minnesota birds not found in Birds of Minnesota)

I very seldom write book reviews of books I don’t like. I have a lot of experience with field guides, and although I have two favorites, the National Geographic Guide and the Kaufman guide, I realize that we each use different strategies for birding and what may be perfect for one person won’t work as well for someone else.

But there are two guides that not only don’t seem useful to me, but seem actually misleading in important ways: Stan Tekiela's Birds of Minnesota (or of other states) and Richard Crossley's Crossley ID Guide. They’re both very big sellers, so my opinion is clearly not very widely held, but it might be useful to consider these issues before buying them.

Least Flycatcher (One of the many common Minnesota birds not found in Birds of Minnesota)

The first is a whole series of guides, each titled "Birds of [a particular state]", such as Birds of Minnesota or Birds of Wisconsin. These guides show only a fraction of the birds of the state they’re covering. Birds of Minnesota covers only 111 species, though there are over 400 species found in the state. [The official state list last I checked included 437 species, including 312 regularly occurring species.] Some people think providing fewer possibilities makes it easier for beginners, so I went through the list of birds I figured out my very first spring of birding, before I knew other birders and had to struggle through identifications of everything, including chickadees and mallards. Of the 40 species I saw my first spring, 6 are not in Birds of Minnesota at all, nor in Birds of Illinois or Birds of Michigan, the states where I was doing most of my birding then. [These species are Nashville, Magnolia, Black-throated Green, and Blackburnian Warblers; Rough-winged Swallow; and Veery.]

Black-throated Green Warbler (One of the common Minnesota birds not found in Birds of Minnesota)

We moved to our house in Duluth in July 1981, when I was pregnant and then dealing with a newborn. I saw 65 species in my backyard that first year. Of them, 16 species—almost 25%—are not in Birds of Minnesota. [These species are Rough-legged Hawk; Herring Gull; Least Flycatcher; Blue-headed, Philadelphia, and Red-eyed Vireos; Winter Wren; Tennessee, Orange-crowned, Nashville, Magnolia, Palm, and Blackpoll Warblers; Lincoln's Sparrow; Rusty Blackbird; and White-winged Crossbill.]

Red-eyed Vireo (One of the common Minnesota species not found in Birds of Minnesota. Roger Tory Peterson once estimated that this bird was the most abundant songbird in North America. It isn't considered that anymore, but is still found in virtually every woodland and still breeds in some city neighborhoods in the Twin Cities and Duluth, where there are plenty of mature deciduous trees.)

It would have been endlessly frustrating for me to tease out identifications of such easy-to-find birds when they weren’t even in the book. Birds of Minnesota has a single photo for most species, and when males and female are both pictured, they can be widely spaced—the Common Goldeneye female is on page 44 while the male is on page 150.

Herring Gull (One of the common Minnesota birds not shown in Birds of Minnesota)

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The brand new Crossley ID Guide is selling like hotcakes. Although it’s larger than many family bibles, it’s eye-catching. Richard Crossley gives most species their own full page plate with a lot of photos pulled together on a single background, some in flight, some perched or swimming. For example, he has at least 13 different Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers in the same scene. This allows you to look at them in different poses, ostensibly in their natural habitat. The trick is that many birds aren’t found in just one habitat. He shows Chipping Sparrows on a golf course rather than in the open coniferous woodlands where they are most abundant, perhaps more because he was enamored of his own cleverness in showing in the distance a golfer chipping a shot than because anyone is likely to head to a golf course in search of Chipping Sparrows. And because he used his own photos, some pages have a lot more than others, and the photo quality is uneven. In real life, one would never see 13 Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers in close proximity, nor 11 Ruby-throated Hummingbirds perched or hovering peaceably together.

Ruby-throated Hummingbird (One of the many species much too territorial to ever be found in the numbers shown in the Crossley ID Guide)

The plates are uneven in how carefully proportions of birds perched in the same tree were worked out—sometimes the near bird is so enormous compared to a bird photoshopped just a bit further back in the same tree that any beginner would be confused about how variable size is for that species. And some of the photos hurt my eyes—I decided it was probably both because of that size issue, and also because the birds were photographed in different lighting situations, and though he does a lot of color correction for that, there are enough differences in the way the light hits different birds, and in how they each were focused, that my eyes were straining to make the pictures make sense. Crossley also uses four-letter alpha codes rather than giving the names of birds he compares each species to. Four-letter codes have been standardized specifically for entering bird banding data, but most banders don’t even memorize these codes, which make reading the Crossley ID Guide more frustrating than helpful. This book is a clever novelty, but I suspect that birders who have a copy will quickly relegate it to a shelf or coffee table rather than actually using it.

Blue Jay (One of the many species found in a great many different habitats besides the one shown in the Crossley ID Guide)

As I noted, I don’t like panning books, and if you’ve personally found either of these books to be particularly useful, let me know. If comments get too contentious or spammy, I'll have to cut them off, but will be happy to put together another blog post/radio program if there are compelling reasons to defend either of these books that I've missed. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a good field guide to give as a gift, I’d look at the new 6^th edition of the National Geographic field guide or Kenn Kaufman’s, as posted in the previous blog post.

Field Guide recommendations

2011-12-06T01:39:00.009-06:00

Thirty-seven years ago, on Christmas, 1974, I opened a field guide for the first time. I’d never known that such a thing existed, but at that moment I became obsessed. My first was a Peterson field guide, and I read the whole thing cover to cover, and discovered in its references Joseph Hickey’s Guide to Bird Watching, which I borrowed from the library and read cover to cover. I also bought the Golden Guide and read it cover to cover. That’s the one that became my birding bible. My trusty Golden Guide got me through learning all the basic birds in the Midwest, and as I learned those birds, couldn’t help but notice the many birds that were from more far-flung places. I knew the book so intimately that when I took trips to the Southeast, Arizona, Texas, the Black Hills, Washington, and Oregon, I had no trouble identifying those birds, too.

This all happened right when the American Ornithologists Union was changing the classification of several species. I wrote name changes into my book to keep them straight. Then, in 1983, the National Geographic Society published a great field guide, designed with the same format as my trusty Golden Guide but with up-to-date maps and species classification. The National Geographic guide also benefitted from all the advances in bird identification that arose with the more sophisticated birding community of the 70s. Much as I loved my Golden Guide, I finally put it aside for the National Geographic.

National Geographic is uniquely committed to keeping their field guide up to date. This fall, the 6^th edition was released. And this edition has so many major improvements that I’d have bought it even if I didn’t collect the whole series. The new edition has the thumb tabs for finding important sections that was introduced in the fifth edition, and this time there are also two excellent quick indexes on the inside cover, one organized alphabetically, the other a fold-out with pictures of each family, to make it easy for beginners to find the bird they’re searching for. There’s also a fabulous improvement in the bird drawings—in this edition, important features are marked with quick notes explaining them right next to the drawing. The book is entirely up to date, at least until the AOU comes up with new taxonomic changes. The new National Geographic is the field guide I’ll have with me all the time.

I still treasure my Guide to Bird Watching by Joseph Hickey, which is available as a Dover reprint, but the best book now for learning exactly how to go about bird watching is Kenn Kaufman’s wonderful new Field Guide to Advanced Birding.

Kenn Kaufman also wrote the only photo-field guide that I recommend. It’s not quite as complete as the National Geographic, but for people who are just starting out and want something really user-friendly, the perfect book choices would be the two Kenn Kaufman guides—and they don’t weigh much more put together than the National Geographic guide.

These are the field guides I personally find most useful for birding, and would be good choices for gift-giving. But the best guide is really an individual decision. If you’re looking for a field guide for yourself, go to a bookstore or library and thumb through them, pulling out the ones that look best to you. Look up a few birds you know really well—like blue jays, robins, and chickadees—and pick the one that shows them the way you see them.

Juncos!

2011-12-06T01:35:00.003-06:00

Transcript of Monday's For the Birds

One of our most abundant, familiar birds is also one of the most taxonomically confusing. A 1995 estimate set the Dark-eyed Junco’s total population at approximately 630 million, and John James Audubon wrote in 1831, “There is not an individual in the Union who does not know the little Snow-bird.” Common as juncos are, Audubon was exaggerating their familiarity a wee bit—when I started birding as an adult, I’d never heard of them, and I had no clue when I saw my first at my in-law’s place in a Chicago suburb on March 21, 1975, that the junco was the bird sung about in Anne Murray’s “Snowbird.”

In teasing out its identification in my Golden Guide, I saw that there were 5 species of juncos in the United States—fortunately, the birds I saw were very typical Slate-colored Juncos, the one described by Henry David Thoreau as leaden skies above, snow beneath. I loved how easy they were to identify. If they didn’t sit still long enough to give me a satisfying look, they’ve give away their identity when they spread their tiny wings and flew away, showing off their white outer tail feathers like lovely streamers.

Our common slate-colored junco also ranges throughout much of the West. The other birds considered separate species in 1975 were the Oregon Junco found in much of the West, the Gray-headed and White-winged Juncos with more restricted ranges in the West, and the Mexican Junco, found in western Mexico and Southeastern Arizona above 5,000 feet. In 1983, four of the species were lumped into one species, called the Dark-eyed Junco, and the Mexican Junco became the Yellow-eyed Junco. When Russ and I went to Arizona last month, I got to see other varieties of Dark-eyed Juncos, along with some gorgeous Yellow-eyed Juncos in the mountains outside Tucson.

Most of us in the upper Midwest see only the typical slate-colored variety of Dark-eyed Junco. Even so, our juncos vary, including the intensely-dark older adult males, the paler young adult males and adult females, and young birds which may be streaked as well as being pale. But every now and then one of the western forms appears at our feeders, too, making the birding more interesting.

For scientists, juncos are perfect research subjects. They can survive Canadian winters and are easy to maintain in captivity. In laboratories juncos have been subjected to extremely cold temperatures and long day lengths to establish that it’s the increasing photoperiod, not weather, that makes birds physiologically get into breeding readiness, even though weather has a huge impact on breeding behavior. If juncos are easy to study, they’re extremely difficult to classify. Many researchers believe that DNA analysis will lead to more changes. One day I may well be reading some ornithological news at breakfast and discover that I’ve got brand new lifers, thanks to having seen Dark-eyed Junco varieties that will turn out to be different species.

Whatever their classification, juncos are easy for just about anyone to watch and photograph, at least anyone who is a little more aware of them than I was before I became a birder. I’ve gotten lovely close-up photos of them in my backyard simply by setting up my photo blind near where I put out birdseed. Right now, juncos are the most abundant birds in my backyard. As winter progresses, some or all of them will wend their way south, but right now I’m taking great pleasure in my little snowbirds.

Thanksgiving Gratitude

2011-11-23T00:07:00.002-06:00

(Transcript of Thanksgiving For the Birds)

Sometimes I feel like the richest person in the whole world. I’m hardly wealthy—my annual income usually barely reaches 5 figures and will certainly never see 6 figures—but I’ve got everything I need and more. Russ and I are happy, our children are healthy, wonderful human beings, our house is holding together, and our little dog Photon is still perky and loving at 13 ½.

My cats, one brought in as a stray and one that was a feral cat in one of those Trap-Neuter-Release programs, are both lovely, healthy pets satisfied with life as indoor cats.

I’ve been living with a sweet little Eastern Screech-Owl for almost 12 years, and Archimedes is still easy-going and happy to do education programs with me.

Photographers just about always want new lenses and the latest camera bodies, but I’m very satisfied with the equipment I have right now. Yeah, I could use a 500-mm lens and one of the cameras with a professional-level sensor, but I’m so happy with the photos that I get with my own setup that I don’t feel the least bit envious of those with better equipment, and at the end of a long hike, I’m especially grateful that I don’t have bigger, heavier gear.

After coming home from the Grand Canyon, I’m grateful for the existence of California Condors, and that there are so many individuals and organizations and government employees who have worked so tirelessly for so many decades struggling to bring this exquisite bird back from the brink of extinction. And I’m grateful for the Grand Canyon itself, along with all the other public lands in America.

In 1953, Roger Tory Peterson brought his English friend James Fisher on a 100-day birding adventure to America’s greatest locations. After they returned home, Fisher wrote in Wild America of how the media shows what America is like to Europe:

They show us too little of their earthly paradise, and publicize too little their determination to share it with wild nature. Perhaps they have forgotten that they had dedicated National Parks before we in England had even one little, local, private nature-protection society. Or perhaps they think that to tell of these things would arouse again our not-so-secret resentment at the boast that all that the Americans have is bigger and better… [N]ever have I seen such wonders or met such worthy landlords so worthy of their land. They have had, and still have, the power to ravage it; and instead have made it a garden.

Not all the places Fisher and Peterson visited are still intact, as Scott Weidensaul found during the time he was retracing their steps, recounted in Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul. But I’m grateful for the many places that have been preserved so lovingly for you and me and the plants and animals that have so enriched every human being who has lived here from our earliest history. I’m grateful to live in a world dotted with Bridled Titmice, Mountain Chickadees, ravens, Gambel’s Quails, and Cinnamon Teal.

I’m grateful that someone once named a strikingly shiny black bird with a jaunty crest and red eyes the Phainopepla. I love the clear whistle that Phainopeplas make, and I especially am grateful that when I whistled to one Phainopepla, he looked me right in the eye and whistled back at me.

And after a long journey seeing all these wonders and condors flying over all of it, I’m grateful that as we walked into the house after this long journey, a cardinal alighted in the tree next to the front porch and half a dozen chickadees called out a greeting to me. On this Thanksgiving, I feel rich and blessed beyond measure. And I’m thankful for my ability to feel gratitude in the face of so much genuine wealth.

Bottled Water Battles

2011-11-22T01:25:00.006-06:00

UPDATE 16 December 2011: Grand Canyon may be banning bottled water early in 2012.

(Transcript of Wednesday's For the Birds)

The Grand Canyon is not just one of America’s greatest treasures—it’s one of the seven natural wonders of the world. I’ve now visited it twice: first in April, 1982, and then this month. And unlike a lot of things, the Grand Canyon has seen a lot of wonderful improvements in the past three decades. My favorites are the water refilling stations set in a great many places along the North and South Rims, dispensing delicious spring water so that people can refill their bottles for free.

Fully 30% of all the waste generated at the Grand Canyon is in the form of bottles—it’s expensive for the park to lug all the trash out, and a lot of bottles and bottle caps end up being tossed or left as litter rather than properly placed in recycling bins. To make a real difference in the waste stream, Stephen Martin, a Grand Canyon park official, planned to ban sales of bottled water once the water refilling stations were all in place. But just before the ban went into effect, National Parks Service Director Jon Jarvis blocked the ban, shortly after the Coca Cola corporation voiced its displeasure. Coke donates large sums of money to National Parks, all fully tax-deductable, giving it a lot of influence, and it did not want to lose Grand Canyon sales of Dasani bottled water, a Coke product.

The waste stream at the Grand Canyon would be reason enough to ban bottled water where it’s free and easy to fill water bottles with extremely fine spring water. But there’s another element in this disturbing equation. California Condors, especially young fledglings, have a tendency to ingest litter. Dead condors are necropsied, and a disturbing number have various items of trash in their stomachs, including plastic, glass, and bottle caps.

Coca Cola claims that visitors to the park deserve to choose what kind of water they drink. But Coke and Pepsi both frequently negotiate with schools and universities, highway rest stops, and other vendors to keep people from being able to choose their competitors’ products—apparently it’s okay for corporations to limit consumer choice in the name of corporate competition but not in the name of preserving America’s last remaining wild treasures in a reasonably pristine state. And because the issue doesn’t simply involve issues of trash removal but also threatens the precious lives of critically endangered birds, it would seem like a no-brainer that the Park would not bow to high handed corporate pressure, except in such a corporatized America.

Before learning about any of this, I bought a bottle of coke on our trip, and ironically, the bottle cap had a little ad about how Coca Cola is ostensibly saving the Polar Bear. I wonder if bottles of coke sold in northern Alaska and Canada tout Coke’s work to save the condor?

Anyway, thanks to Coke’s concern about consumer choice, I decided to make the choice to stop consuming their products as long as they wield such power over national parks that supposedly belong to American citizens, not international corporations. I’ve long been a Coke drinker, and must say it’s by far my favorite soft drink, but I can live without it. I cannot live without our most precious national treasures—the breathtaking land and iconic birds that represent the very best of America.

New York Times blog article about this issue.

Read an opinion piece about the issue here.

Condors Still Face Problems

2011-11-22T01:01:00.002-06:00

(Transcript of Tuesday's For the Birds)

Seeing California Condors flying high in the Arizona sky was one of the most thrilling events of my life. But even as I am so deeply delighted by the reintroduction of them to California and Arizona, I’m saddened at the problems they still face. The Peregrine Fund maintains a web page with detailed information on each condor released in Arizona since December 12, 1996. Of the six birds set free on that historical day, five are now dead, only one from a natural cause—Golden Eagle predation. One female died as a breeding adult from swallowing coins. This horrible and wasteful cause of death seems related to female condors’ need for calcium during the breeding season—they pick up shiny objects which would in nature be limited to pieces of bone and small bits of minerals. Another breeding adult female condor released in 2002 suffered the same fate. We humans pride ourselves on being intellectually superior to other animals, but how smart is it to toss toxic, zinc-laden pennies into the Grand Canyon?

Two of the first-released condors died from lead poisoning. In 2008, Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law in California the Ridley-Tree Condor Preservation Act, which prohibits the use of lead shot or bullets in the area of California where condors concentrate, but no such law has been passed in Arizona or Utah. Many people think that we don’t need government to impose laws with regard to these kinds of issues—that education will suffice—but lead is still the most prevalent cause of death for condors: a total of 19 are now known to have been killed by lead poisoning since 2000, directly related to hunters’ use of lead bullets and shot, and several condors have gone missing in Utah during and within a month or two after hunting seasons, when loss due to lead poisoning is most common. In 2010, blood samples showed that 72 % of captured birds had been exposed to lead, with 34 of them requiring treatment for lead poisoning. Even if hunting with lead throughout the range of condors were banned, people wouldn’t necessarily comply—after all, three condors were killed in Arizona directly by shooting.

One of the original condors was killed in a collision with a transmission line less than a year after release. So the Peregrine Fund people worked out training techniques to get captive-bred chicks to avoid these lines. Since then, no more have been killed by lines. Condors are curious and intelligent, and some of the originally-released birds were too incautious near park visitors, so before release, captive-reared birds were also trained to avoid people.

As of October 31, there are 205 California Condors in the wild: 111 in central and southern California, 23 in Baja California, and 71 in the Grand Canyon area of Arizona and up into Utah. 27 wild-fledged birds now live in California, 1 in Baja California, and 12 in Arizona. Thanks to the first captive breeding programs at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and the Los Angeles Zoo, and additional programs at the Oregon Zoo and the World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho, there are continuing to be releases of adolescent birds that may ultimately strengthen numbers of the California Condor until it’s truly self-sustaining again. But it’s going to take public will to prevent more of the tragic and senseless condor deaths that the project has so far endured.

The Day of the Condors

2011-11-21T12:40:00.005-06:00

I spent my sixtieth birthday, on 11/11/11, in the Grand Canyon in order to finally see a California Condor. Heading to the Grand Canyon in November was an act of faith—faith that the weather wouldn’t turn horrible, and faith that my line of sight would actually intersect with the flight path of one of the few existing California Condors in Arizona. We made it to Des Moines our first night, and woke to almost a foot of snow and trees that had crashed down upon several cars in our motel’s parking lot. That seemed ominous, but our car was spared and we made it Flagstaff and then to our motel in Tusayan, just outside the national park, on the eve of my birthday without problems.

Russ and I started out my birthday hiking here and there along the South Rim, which was beautiful despite the woefully overcast sky.

When the visitors center opened, we headed there to get suggestions about where to find the birds. The woman at the desk said we should come back in March. That wasn’t helpful at all, but I had no intention of getting discouraged. All day I kept my eyes to the murky skies, without luck. I had to settle for the gorgeous scenery and ravens wherever I looked.

The daily program about condors was held at 3 pm.

The woman giving the talk, a delightful and knowledgeable ranger named Elyssa Shalla, told us that most of the condors had already retreated to lower elevations further north, especially in the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument area in the border area between Arizona and Utah. There were still two nestlings in the Grand Canyon national park—they were six months old, but weren’t expected to take their first flight for another week or two. One was in a cave in a nearby formation called the Battleship, but the cave was on the opposite side, impossible to see from any vantage point on the South Rim. We could watch for their parents to return with food, but that happens only once every day or two, and sometimes the parents may even be gone for four or five days.

But Elyssa wasn’t at all discouraging—she said it was possible we’d spot one of the parents, and also said that our best chance would be at the Vermilion Cliffs site outside the park, where the Peregrine Fund releases them. This area has milder winter weather than in the canyon, which the birds prefer. Each bird covers a vast area—sometimes a hundred miles in a single day—but it was certainly worth a shot.

The next morning the sky was brilliant blue, with high winds—exactly the conditions that draw condors into the sky—as we drove to the Vermilion Cliffs. We missed our turn onto a tiny dirt road that leads to the site and found ourselves at the entrance to the Kaibab National Forest at the very moment when two condors were flying overhead.

Even though they were very high up, condors are huge enough, with their 22-foot wingspan, that I got thrilling looks.

My photos are far from magazine quality but diagnostic. Russ even managed to get a photograph showing both me and a distant but visible condor.

After the birds drifted off beyond the horizon, we headed to the Vermilion Cliffs to see the release site.

And there were three more condors flying high in the sky! On our way back, we stopped at a gas station near the Little Colorado River, and there were three more!

The distances were too great to get detailed photos, but some of my pictures did allow me to read wing tags that identify individual birds. (You can find out the history of tagged condors in Arizona on this page of the Peregrine Fund website.)

Usually I’m most excited about seeing new birds up close and personal. But I think the most thrilling thing about seeing these condors was that they were doing exactly what I’ve dreamed for so long about them doing—flying high in the sky, far above us mere humans. Seeing these eight California Condors was far and away the best birthday gift of my entire life. And the November weather didn’t turn horrible until what was supposed to be the very last day, as we crossed back into Minnesota. We got stuck in Faribault overnight, but the trip was worth it.

(Added after posting) I read in the news today that a man's body was found by birdwatchers observing condors at the Navajo Bridge on Thursday. This is exactly where we found the third group on Saturday, the 12th. It will be interesting to find out how long he'd been dead. The story is here.

Birding Profile!

2011-11-20T20:28:00.004-06:00

The current issue of Birding, the journal of the American Birding Association, includes a 3-page interview of me! What an honor!

I really love the ABA. They have produced some of the very finest guides to birding in various areas of the country, showing you where and when to find birds. These ABA guides are invaluable and indispensable not just for those of us who want to see rarities and very localized birds, but for anyone traveling to a new state or region who wants to know where the nicest natural areas are, along with the very best sewage settling ponds!

Although I keep lists and some of my lists are pretty long, I'm not competitive, so never submit any of my lists to ABA or the Wisconsin or Minnesota state bird organizations. But I love that you can count on ABA to keep track of and publish area and year lists for those who enjoy the sport of birding, and to publish the most useful books and checklists for birding at home and away. That's the cool thing about this organization—despite the occasional flare-ups between those focused mainly on conservation and those focused mainly on the more fun aspects of birding, it's the home organization for anyone who loves to focus binoculars on birds.

Turning comments off

2011-11-08T08:00:00.004-06:00

I've temporarily turned off comments on my blog because so many defenders of TNR programs have been spouting off regarding my posts about feral and other outdoor cats, using my blog as a forum for their misguided beliefs. They keep dismissing studies about the numbers of birds killed by cats, but have yet to present a single peer-reviewed scientific paper suggesting a more accurate number, reminding me of global-warming deniers who selectively rip apart scientific studies without being able to put together their own scientific research disproving it. The reason they don't present countering scientific information is because the facts are not on their side.

Meanwhile, they seem to think it's okay for cats to kill small mammals when this is equally inhumane. Also, studies suggest that cats compete with raptors and other small predators for this resource, to the detriment of kestrels and other species.

I'm illustrating this post with a photo of a Yellow-rumped Warbler. A single cat in my own neighborhood once killed at least 18 Yellow-rumped and Palm Warblers during an October migration fall-out in Duluth. I picked up the tiny victims, strewn on a sidewalk, and brought them to the cat's owner. No one was home, but I left the carcasses there, along with a note promising that I would bring the cat to the pound if I ever saw it outside again. That did the trick.

But imagine that. Eighteen beautiful birds killed in a single event—not for food but simply because cats love to play-hunt even when they're well fed. No one has ever shown that neutered feral cats stop killing birds when they are fed, either. TNR? Just say no.

Birds teaching birds to speak English

2011-11-08T01:15:00.003-06:00

Transcript of next Monday's For the Birds

Every now and then there’s a breaking news story proving yet again that birds are smarter than people typically give them credit for being. A story in the November 6 issue of The Telegraph tells of wild parrots of various species in Sydney, Australia, saying human phrases such as “Who’s a pretty boy, then?” Apparently parrots who learned these phrases from people before escaping captivity used them often enough in the wild that parrots who had spent their entire lives in the wild have been starting to talk, too.

During the decade-long drought in the western regions of New South Wales, parrots who couldn’t handle the devastating conditions started to wander, searching out new areas where food and water were easier to find. Many settled in Sydney, where wild galahs, sulphur-crested cockatoos, and corellas are now regularly heard saying various human phrases. Martyn Robinson from the Australian Museum in Sydney, said “I just hope a pet bird that’s been taught dirty words doesn’t join a flock because we don’t want to hear that kind of thing going around the back gardens.”

People made a big thing about birds teaching one another human language, but we didn’t have to search halfway across the globe to find that out. Marge Gibson, executive director of the Raptor Education Group, one of the finest wildlife rehabilitation facilities in the world, has seen first hand how birds can pick up human language. She treated a female raven with a wing fracture for over a year, and the bird picked up some simple words such as “Hi,” “Hello,” “Hey, you!” and “How are you?” After Marge released the bird, which she called Lenore, the raven occasionally returned to the clinic grounds, and when she flew over visitors she’d call out her favorite phrases. This year Lenore raised chicks and occasionally brought her fledglings over. Marge heard them first babbling baby talk—she said “hello” came out as “hawoo, and “Hey” was “Haaaya,” and by summer’s end they were doing almost as good a job of speaking English as their mother.

This summer, Discover magazine ran a story about how scientists have long known that parrots are one of only three groups of animals, the others being dolphins and humans, who have individual names. In parrots, each bird has its own signature call that others use when addressing it and that the bird uses itself in avian “conversation.” This summer a study of wild parrots showed that even before a chick begins serious vocalizing, its parents provide it with a name which the chick will fine tune and then use throughout its life.

I wonder if research on corvids will eventually show that their social vocalizations are more complex than we suspect. When I had my Blue Jay Sneakers, she learned to say “Hi,” and “C’mon.” The first time she talked, I was on a trip. When Russ heard her saying those words in my voice, he thought it was me and was amazed when he finally realized it was Sneakers. She did most of her talking when I wasn’t around. I think she imitated me when she couldn’t see me to at least hear my voice. The last few years I had her, I was also caring for a jay named BJ who had a congenital deformity making it impossible for him to open his wings. He’d been raised in the wild, and was very scared of people. But he bonded instantly with Sneakers. When Sneakers died, suddenly BJ started saying “Hi,” and “C’mon,” exactly the way Sneakers had done. I can’t explain it except that this seemed to be his way of filling the void and hearing a sound he associated with Sneakers.

People once believed that the earth was at the center of the universe. At some point we’ll see that just as our planet is one of many similar bodies suspended in space, our species is one of many eking out an existence on this little planet. Being a member of a world of species doesn’t diminish human specialness any more than being a member of a family diminishes our individual specialness.

Conservation Big Year: Target List

2011-11-08T01:09:00.003-06:00

Transcript of Friday's For the Birds

Now that I’ve decided I want to spend 2013 doing a Conservation Big Year, wherein I spend the year trying to see all of North America’s endangered and threatened birds and also species of concern, my first task was to list the birds on my target list. I decided to use the American Bird Conservancy’s Watch List of declining and rare species on the North American continent north of Mexico. That list is pretty current, but I’ve added Northern Bobwhite and Evening Grosbeak, two species that are still considered common but have declined dramatically in the past decade. I can’t possibly afford the travel necessary to search for the 38 Hawaiian species on the watch list, though Hawaii is home to the most threatened and endangered species of any state and has one of the biggest concentrations of endangered birds in the world. I’ll have to save that for another year.

My target list for 2013 includes 174 species, though three—the Eskimo Curlew, Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and Bachman’s Warbler, are almost certainly extinct and so I won’t be looking for them. If I were to get all of the remaining species, it would include 34 lifers—birds I’ve never seen anywhere—along with 4 subspecies I’ve never seen and 2 birds I’ve seen in the tropics on their wintering grounds but never in North America. Searching for most of these birds will also allow me to see lots of other birds.

A few will be pretty easy to get right around home. Le Conte’s Sparrows nest in the pasture adjacent to my mother-in-law’s driveway in Port Wing, Wisconsin. I’ve seen a few other species in my own backyard—Red-headed Woodpecker, Olive-sided Flycatcher, Varied Thrush, Bay-breasted Warbler, Canada Warbler, and Rusty Blackbird—though none in recent years. Some will require serious work to get to. The Colima Warbler is found only in the Chisos Mountains in Texas, and one good access to their breeding grounds is via a hiking trail loop about 14 miles long. But Russ and I have wanted to go to Big Bend since high school, so this trip would be especially cool in many ways. McKay’s Bunting, a beautiful relative of the Snow Bunting, can be found in summer on islands off Alaska—I don’t know how I’ll get there yet, but I’ll need to figure out a way to see that one and some other northern specialties, like Steller’s and Spectacled Eider, Emperor Goose, and Ross’s and Ivory Gulls. I want to find out how climate change is affecting these spectacular birds and what their long-term prospects are.

Just about all of the birds on the list, especially the endangered and threatened species, are found most easily on public lands, so I’ll be planning lots of trips to national wildlife refuges and state and national parks. The Nature Conservancy also does a lot of splendid work maintaining habitat for declining species. Just plotting out my itinerary promises to be fascinating, figuring out when and where these birds are most likely to be. I’ll also be studying why each one is declining and what’s being done to help it.

As I plot out my Conservation Big Year, I’ll be posting a lot of information on a new blog. I’ve linked to it on my regular blog and my webpage. You’ll be able to find all this work in progress at www.conservationbigyear.blogspot.com.

Planning for 11/11/11

2011-11-08T01:06:00.002-06:00

Transcript of For the Birds for Thursday

When I was a fifth grader, my mind had a tendency to wander to a weirdly numerical fantasyland. I somehow discovered entirely on my own that the digits of every number divisible by three added up to a number that was also divisible by three, and the same with the digits of every number divisible by nine. I worked out that every month that starts on a Sunday has a Friday the thirteenth. Naturally a little girl so taken with numbers would enjoy having a birthday on 11/11, and I even figured out that on 11/11/11, I would turn 60—that is, if I could possibly live that long. That seemed cosmic, because all those ones added up to 6, the same as the sum of the digits in 60.

So I’ve been looking forward to 11/11/11 for a very long time. And somehow the coolness of that unique date deserves to be honored with a lifetime experience. So by the time this program airs, Russ and I will be headed to the Grand Canyon, where I’m hoping against hope to see a California Condor on the grand date.

I’ve never seen a condor, and the very possibility thrills me. The very last truly wild California Condor was taken into captivity on Easter Sunday, 1987, a year after I started producing “For the Birds.” Taking every single bird out of the wild was controversial, but it turns out it was absolutely necessary if the species wasn’t to be consigned to oblivion. Every one of the 22 remaining birds had very high levels of lead in its blood. They were given chelation therapy and as they recovered, were bred at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and the Los Angeles Zoo. Success of the captive program was enough that a handful of condors were released back into the wild starting in 1991.

Trying to restore this species has been the most expensive species conservation project ever undertaken in the United States. It’s still going very slowly. As of April 2011, there were 394 California Condors known to be living, including 181 in the wild. In comparison, the wild Whooping Crane flock that migrates between Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park and Texas’s Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, which numbered only 15 birds in 1941, numbered 279 in the wild as of August 2011. Thanks to captive breeding programs, there are also 97 birds in the reintroduced migratory flock that moves between Wisconsin and Florida. Along with young birds being released this year, that means there is a total of 414 Whooping Cranes in the wild and 162 in captivity. Of course, work on cranes started sooner than that on condors, and cranes aren’t still being poisoned by lead in bullets and shot. Arnold Schwartzenegger signed into law the Ridley-Tree Condor Preservation Act, a bill that went into effect July 1, 2008 that requires that hunters use non-lead bullets when hunting in a large part of the condor's California range. This law was intensely opposed by the NRA and many hunters. Unfortunately, the condor populations that have been established in the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park still suffer from high lead levels. These scavengers pick up gut piles from large game animals, which can have shot or remnants of bullets in them, and also the remains of animals that got away or were simply shot as vermin, whose carcasses are left out there, riddled with lead shot.

I won’t be looking for carcasses and with luck won’t be confronted with cases of lead poisoned birds while I’m in the Grand Canyon. I just want to spend 11/11/11 gazing upon one or more California Condors floating aloft. Just one glimpse would make this the most perfect of birthdays. And even if I don’t get to see one, spending time in an area where these birds live will be a soul-satisfying experience. Oh—and I hear the Grand Canyon is rather pretty in its own right.

Reporting Owls: The Controversy

2011-11-06T23:46:00.003-06:00

(Transcripts of Monday and Tuesday's For the Birds)

Last week, the listserv of the Minnesota Ornithologists Union had a heated exchange about whether or not people should post precise locations of northern owls. It’s a complicated issue. There are known cases of birds whose nests failed or who themselves died from the constant stress of hordes of birders gawking at them. In Chicago, an extremely rare Burrowing Owl turned up on Montrose Beach. So many birders turned up, each one in turn searching for the owl in the low vegetation and making it flush, that a Cooper’s Hawk flew in and grabbed it for an easy meal.

One of my favorite people, Bob Russell with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, cited some cases of what excessive pressure on birds can do. He wrote to the listserv:

Concentrations of Long-eared Owls usually require dense cover and adjacent foraging fields. Disturbing these birds from favored roosts could force a wintering owl into much less optimum habitat or lead to poorer cover where they could be preyed upon by Great Horned Owls and eagles, or harassed by crows and insensitive photographers.

Most owls sleep during the daytime and when the noise of birders and photographers approaching too close and harassing the owl to open its eyes for a better photo, the bird obviously suffers from not being able to stay as warm as it would when it's all fluffed up and asleep. Since starvation is a factor in the death of many wintering Great Gray and Boreal owls and perhaps other owl species, even one afternoon of disturbed rest or no rest could be the difference between an owl making it or not making it through the next day. Stomping down a path through the snow to get to such roosts is not much different than beating down grass to get to a bird nest in a bush in summer. It provides an easy pathway for a 4-legged predator to approach the roost site.

In my own experience, when birders flocked to the Sax-Zim Bog during the owl invasion in 2004-5, quite a few owls were killed by cars. And many birders, particularly photographers, were seen tossing out white mice and gerbils to owls, often next to roads. This is a standard practice for getting owls to fly in close for photographs, and is also used for banding certain owls, though not the ones caught in banding stations such as at Hawk Ridge, where the birds simply fly into mist nets as they migrate. I personally find baiting with live rodents to be unacceptably cruel to the little animals.

People may not find rodents endearing, but they do suffer, going from a warm pet shop to being tossed out in the icy snow before being ripped apart. I sort of accept this as a necessary evil for research, because owl banding provides valuable information that helps us understand and track population trends, and has provided critical information needed to develop conservation plans. Owl banders also may provide first aid or food as they band owls, increasing their longevity. But in my mind baiting with mice is unjustifiable cruelty when it’s just for the personal pleasure or profit of getting a photo. It’s also risky. Minnesota children have contracted salmonella poisoning from pet store mice, and those children weren’t actually eating the mice. It is almost definitely more dangerous for owls.

Even worse, some photographers cast out fake mice on fishing lines to control the owl’s movements. Because of the way owls cast pellets, to conserve fluids they empty the contents of their glandular stomach before spitting up the pellet. This means that before digesting anything new, they must get those fluids back into their stomach from their bloodstream and interstitial tissues before their next meal. This process begins when they’re in pursuit of prey, and can throw an owl’s electrolytes out of kilter when it chases something it thinks is prey but comes up empty. This is particularly dangerous for owls who haven’t eaten in a while. When I rehabbed birds, I always administered fluids to emaciated owls before feeding them.

That is why I’m reluctant to post some of my own sightings of owls and other birds. But tomorrow I’ll talk about the other side of the debate.

Reporting Owls Part II

Last time I talked about a debate about whether birders should report rare owls on listservs. Because of the risks to owls, some people refuse to post exact locations of owls, and naturally some photographers and birders take umbrage. Beginning birders are especially offended that more experienced birders would keep such information secret. I can understand that viewpoint, remembering my own frustrations when I was starting out not knowing where the best places were. And to add to the frustration of novice birders nowadays, professional birding guides often know where the best birds are but may share that information only with their paying customers. This can build resentment. And knowing that experienced birders are keeping this information close to the vest also contributes to a feeling that birders are a closed community when we should be welcoming newcomers with open arms.

But even as I was frustrated when starting out and not knowing where to look for birds, I got a lot of valuable field experience that made me a much better birder by searching out my own birds. I’m about to turn 60, and like any geezer have a certain nostalgia for the “good-old days” when we birders took pride in finding our own birds rather than following directions to precise locations. Even more like an old geezer, I can’t help but think that people today want too much instant gratification, expecting their life list to grow by leaps and bounds from the start. In my first year of birding, I saw just one owl—a Snowy Owl that flew right over Russ’s and my heads as we walked on Lake Shore Drive along the Chicago lakefront. My US Fish and Wildlife Service friend Bob Russell wrote:

Whatever happened to the joy of discovering your own birds? Long-eared, Northern-saw-whet, and Short-eared owls likely occur seasonally in almost any Minnesota county and I recall at least one article in the Loon in how to find your own Long-eared Owls. Check out the pine and spruce plantations and stands where you live for these owls or grape vines and dense crabtrees or young pines.

I may have been stuck finding most of my lifers when I was starting out, but then again, in my second year of birding, I got my lifer Short-eared Owls thanks to people sharing the location where the birds were hunting every evening just outside East Lansing. It took time for the word to get out back then, so staked-out birds like this could only be seen by a lot of birders when the birds stuck around for weeks rather than days or hours. We were warned to stay on the road, and back then photographers weren’t stalking these birds so intensively as they are today.

Whenever people get to see a really cool and charismatic bird, such as an owl, in the wild, it gets them excited about birds and birding. The more birders we have, the more pressure there can be to protect species that need help. And really, most of the time revealing locations for owls doesn’t harm the owls.

So it’s a quandary. Flaring tempers on the listserv are like so many of today’s highly charged debates, wherein each side wants to score points rather than work to find the wisest solution for everyone. I know where I stand on the issue of baiting owls with real or fake mice—I would never consider doing it myself, and I’d never buy a photo of an owl if there was a chance the photographer had baited it. I never share information with birders I suspect of doing this, and never post on a listserv when a bird seems the least bit vulnerable. But I wish we could all state our opinions and justifications and leave people to draw their own personal conclusions, rather than ridiculing people on the other side for being selfish, either for keeping information from others or for putting birds at risk. This does nothing more than raise the temperature of an already heated debate that will never be resolved.

Top Ten Reasons to Look Forward to Turning Sixty!

2011-11-03T13:46:00.006-05:00

Note: because my birthday is on 11/11/11, this list actually has 11 reasons!

11. Senior rates at the theater!

10. Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in 1927.

9. I like the song 60-Minute Man by Billy Ward and the Dominoes. And since the song was released in 1951, the song is 60 years old, too!

8. 60 is a Harshad number—that is, a number divisible by the sum of its digits in base 10 (6+0).

7. The Babylonian number system had a base of sixty, inherited from the Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations, and possibly motivated by the large number of divisors which 60 has. Our culture has inherited our clock and some geometrical artifacts from this system, which is why one hour has 60 minutes and one minute has 60 seconds.

6. Each angle of an equilateral triangle is 60 degrees.

5. 60 is the sum of twin primes (29+31) and the sum of four consecutive primes (11+13+17+19). It’s sandwiched between two primes (59 and 61). It’s the smallest number which is the sum of two odd primes in 6 ways.

4. The icosidodecahedron has 60 edges, all equivalent. Buckminsterfullerene C₆₀has 60 carbon atoms in each molecule, arranged in a truncated icosahedron.

3. 60 is a composite number and a highly composite number, with divisors 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60. It’s also one of only 3 unitary perfect numbers within a human lifespan in years. (The first few unitary perfect numbers are 6, 60, 90, 87360, 146361946186458562560000.) It is also an excessive number with an abundance of 48. Being ten times a perfect number, 60 is a semiperfect number.

2. #60 on my lifelist was the Scarlet Tanager! (First seen on June 23, 1975, near Kalamazoo, Michigan.)

1. The sum of the digits in 11/11/11 equals the sum of the digits in 60!

Addendum: I just remembered another cool thing about the number 60—the coldest temperature ever recorded in Minnesota was -60 degrees F, on February 2, 1996, in Tower. It was much warmer in Duluth that night. Our thermometer only got down to -41.

Compassion for All Animals

2011-11-02T15:19:00.005-05:00

(Transcript of Friday's For the Birds)

Compassion and empathy are two qualities that human beings extend selectively. Just about everyone lavishes the most compassion and empathy on their immediate family members, a little less on their friends, less on their neighbors, and even less on members of their wider community. Compassion gets pretty watered down when we get to people of different countries, especially those who do not share the same religion or culture.

And then we get to other species. As usual, we lavish more compassion on animals that we can relate to than other animals, and because we’re mammals, that means we feel more compassion for our fellow mammals than we do for birds. By the time we get down to frogs, even though they also are vertebrates, we don’t have much left, and there’s virtually nothing left for invertebrates such as octopuses, even though every researcher who has ever worked with them knows how aware and intelligent they are.

The selectiveness of our compassion for different animals extends to our criminal justice system. When two young men shot a Whooping Crane in Indiana in 2009, they weren’t held in jail and after the trial received only a year of probation and a fine of one dollar plus court costs. Yes—one dollar. The Whooping Crane restoration project that this bird was part of has put millions of dollars toward trying to reintroduce a migratory population of this critically endangered species, and the individual crane killed happened to be the ONLY female who had successfully brought off a chick in Wisconsin so far, but the judge didn’t take any of that into consideration.

Yet in 2007 when a man in Texas shot a feral cat that was stalking endangered Piping Plovers, he was instantly jailed. [At trial, the jury couldn't reach an agreement] And a woman in Washington, DC was just convicted of attempting to poison feral cats, and faces up to a $1000 fine and 6 months in jail.

(Photo by MDF on Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Md)

We humans are an odd species—the very people who hunt birds and mammals for sport as well as food include some individuals who have spent their lives working on conservation of these same species, and trying to educate other hunters about what animals NOT to shoot. But even many of the most avid conservationists see birds as natural resources and not as intelligent individuals capable of suffering. Some people have done research proving intelligence, individuality, and the capacity for emotion in birds. On October 16, Psychology Today’s blog included an article, “Why the Caged Bird Does Not Sing: Captivity and Complex PTSD in parrots and people.” But most people simply do not accept that birds are on a par with mammals in these areas.

The Humane Society of the United States website currently has a graphic showing St. Francis of Assisi linked to a story, “Eye on the Sparrow: faith in action for animals.” The same page says, “We’re the nation’s largest and most effective animal protection organization,” and on the “About Us” link says, “We work to reduce suffering and improve the lives of all animals.” Their logo tells a different story: of the 19 species depicted, only two are birds—a pigeon and a goose or swan, both too large for most domestic cats to be able to bring down, and despite the fact that the number of bird species in the US is significantly larger than the number of mammal species. And the Humane Society not only gives feral cats preferential treatment over birds but also over small mammals. The feral domesticated cats they foist on the natural environment kill literally billions of wild mammals and birds every year. As long as the Humane Society closes their eyes to these suffering and dying creatures, they do not deserve to be called humane.

What to do about feral cats: More questions than answers

2011-11-02T01:02:00.005-05:00

(Transcripts of today's and tomorrow's For the Birds)
Three weeks ago, when Russ and I were in Port Wing, Wisconsin, visiting his mom, we found an emaciated cat lurking around where her juncos, doves, and migratory sparrows hide out. She was a blue-eyed beauty, a Himalayan, looking like a longhaired Siamese but lacking the squashed-in face that some people breed Himalayans to have. She had a husky, cool meow that reminded me of Jean Arthur in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, so I decided to call her Clarissa. Russ’s mom’s nearest neighbor is over a quarter mile away, but I drove over there to see if they’d lost a cat, and put up a notice in The Store, leaving my phone number so people could contact me, and then we drove home with her.

I contacted the Bayfield County sheriff’s office and several veterinarians and humane societies, to see if anyone had reported a lost cat. I had to keep her quarantined from my own cats and Photon, and first thing the next morning, I called my vet and asked if they could squeeze us in so she could have the once over. The first thing they discovered was that she was a neutered male, so suddenly Clarissa turned into Clarence. He had both roundworms and tapeworms. They ran several tests, and learned that he was FIV positive. This disease, akin to HIV in humans, suppresses the immune system. It’s only communicable to cats, passing through the saliva, so can be given to cats who share dishes or who bite or lick one another. Our family is at our limit in the number of pets we can properly deal with anyway, and now it was definite that there was no way we could keep Clarence. But what could we do? I posted on facebook and my blog, and called various humane organizations, but most places euthanize cats with FIV because there’s no cure and they don’t want the disease to spread to other cats.

Two and a half weeks went by, I was getting very nervous about finding him a home, and it wasn’t easy dealing with him at home—when I was around, I could have him up in my home office, but even though he didn’t seem the least bit interested in Archimedes, the poor little owl was petrified of him, so when I wasn’t in the room, I had to keep Clarence in our basement garage.

It was all very stressful, but at last a miracle happened. One of my birding friends on facebook lives in Tucson, and friends of hers south of Madison, Wisconsin, had recently lost a cat. One thing led to another, and this past weekend I drove Clarence to his new home.

Rescuing this cat, which also saved all the birds he otherwise would have eaten, cost about $300 in vet bills, plus the gas for driving 700 miles back and forth. It would have been far cheaper to have him euthanized right off the bat, and maybe more sensible after I found out he was FIV+. I of course also had the option of just leaving him in Port Wing, ignoring his suffering and all the lost birds, but that runs against something deep in my soul. I don’t know what the wisest way to deal with stray and feral cats is, but leaving them outdoors to spread parasites and diseases and kill wildlife is not the solution. People down the road from my mother-in-law allow their cats outside, and Clarence got into a few fights with them. They may have given him FIV, or he may have transmitted it to them. In addition to the danger feral and stray cats cause to people by spreading toxoplasmosis in their droppings, and the risks of spreading disease and parasites to other cats, current estimates put the number of birds killed by cats in the US at more than a billion each year.

I don’t know what the best solution is, but tomorrow I’ll talk about one misguided attempt to deal with feral cats in Washington, DC that may land a wildlife biologist in prison.

*****

Feral and stray cats, and pet cats allowed to spend time outdoors, kill an estimated billion birds a year in the US. People supporting Trap-Neuter-Release programs for feral cats close their eyes to the unimaginable suffering of the small mammals and birds toyed with and killed by these cats. They feel a misguided sense of virtuousness supporting feral colonies, reminding me of the people who used to bring me birds injured by their cats when I was a rehabber. I spent thousands of dollars of my own money and thousands of heartbreaking hours taking care of these birds, and only one of them survived in my decades of rehabbing. A single cat bite crushes bones and punctures skin and muscle, leading to complex and devastating internal injuries and infections. People bringing me these birds drove away feeling virtuous, not thinking at all about the suffering the bird was still undergoing, nor about the suffering of me and my children struggling to keep these birds alive and watching them die. Out of sight, out of mind.

The truth is that there is no such thing as a properly managed feral cat colony. People who think of themselves as humane leave cats out there to kill huge numbers of birds and small mammals and to spread diseases and parasites to other cats before they themselves succumb to disease, frostbite, injuries, or predation. When these cats have access to garden beds or children’s sandboxes, they spread toxoplasmosis to humans. Euthanizing them is far more humane to far more creatures than supporting them in this feral condition.

Unfortunately, in cities like Washington, DC with active trap-neuter-release programs to support feral cat colonies, there is little people can do to protect birds from them, and these cat populations can be far, far larger than any natural predator population can be. When people feed them, they simply keep them alive longer, yet subsidizing them with food has never been shown to reduce the number of birds they kill.

A wildlife biologist with the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Program was at her wits end dealing with the many feral cats fed at an apartment complex next to a park where birds were concentrated during migration. She was videotaped putting poison into feeding dishes at nighttime, and convicted on November 1 of attempted animal cruelty. The maximum penalty is 180 days in jail and a $1000 fine.

As much as I decry feral cat colonies, I know it would be impossible for me to poison cats—not only would they suffer, but any scavengers that ate them would also sicken or die. But I’m sympathetic to the desperation of this biologist, who documented and understood first-hand the damage that cats do to migratory birds. I was also sympathetic to the man in Texas who was convicted of shooting feral cats that had been feeding on endangered plovers. Really, what can we do when so-called "humane" societies foist these subsidized, domesticated killers on wildlife rather than take responsibility for finding a truly humane solution for them?

Sites on the internet promoting feral cat colonies use photos of piles of dead cats that have been euthanized to elicit sympathy to their cause. But where are the photos of the carnage feral cats cause? Why is a quick and humane death for one cat more tragic than the suffering and death of the hundreds of birds that that cat would have killed, along with the diseases and parasites it would have carried to other pets and human beings? The Humane Society of the United States claims to “work to reduce suffering and improve the lives of all animals.” Subsidized feral cat colonies pit one domesticated species against billions of individual animals of hundreds of species. Cats have led to literal extinctions on some islands, have decimated local populations of many vulnerable species, and kill hundreds of thousands or even a billion birds a year in the US. Poisoning or shooting these animals in frustration may not be the best response, but the Humane Society has an obligation to keep feral cats separated entirely from wild birds, or they’re not being humane at all.

Hunters: Eagles Need Your Deer and Turkey Hearts

2011-11-01T00:59:00.003-05:00

Transcript of today's For the Birds

Every year in October and November, the number of eagles taken to rehab centers in Minnesota and Wisconsin rises dramatically. A great many of these birds have lead poisoning, from eating carcasses of deer that got away after being shot, or eating gut piles, when the hunter used lead bullets or buckshot. Last week Marge Gibson at the Raptor Education Group, Inc, or REGI, took in several lead poisoned eagles. Lead is highly toxic to birds and mammals, and remains in the bloodstream until it binds with substances called chelates. Chelation therapy, in which the chelate is infused into the blood to bind to the toxic metal, is the only way to, quite literally, get the lead out. After the lead binds to the chelate, the kidneys can filter it out of the bloodstream.

But chelates themselves are toxic, and it’s hard for the kidneys to filter out too much at a time, so chelates must be given to the eagles in reasonably small, regular doses until the birds’ systems have been cleared of toxins. It’s important for these vulnerable birds to get excellent nutrition as they recover. This year, Marge Gibson has sent out a request for any hunters who could to bring the hearts of deer, bear, turkeys, ducks, or other game to help feed her eagles. REGI is located in Antigo, Wisconsin, so if hunters who live in or spend time near there could freeze the hearts and get them to Marge, it would be enormously helpful. My friend Sandy Gillum, a loon biologist in Eagle River, can also take them to Antigo. If you’re a hunter who can donate the heart from your game, please email me for more information.

In other hunting news, the winner of this year’s Duck Stamp art contest was just announced. Joseph Hautman’s exquisite male Wood Duck, painted in vivid acrylics. This was the fourth time Hautman has won this prestigious award, and the tenth time that he or one of his two brothers won. The art work will be used on the 2012 Duck Stamp, which will be on sale starting in July. Hautman won’t receive any money or other award. Fully 98 cents of every dollar people spend on duck stamps goes directly toward land conservation in the National Wildlife Refuge system, and this is possible because the artists who win the contest donate use of the image for the stamp—their only compensation is a pane of stamps carrying their design. But they may sell prints of their designs, which are sought after by hunters, conservationists, and art collectors.

All waterfowl hunters are required to have that year’s Duck Stamp, which they must sign in ink. Birders should also purchase Duck Stamps—the National Wildlife Refuge System is essential for a great many non-game birds, providing essential breeding habitat for Black-capped Vireos, wintering habitat for Whooping Cranes, and migration stopover habitat for virtually all Neotropical migrants, including warblers, tanagers, orioles, and hummingbirds. This year, your $15 will not just be your contribution to critical habitat and great birding sites—it will also get you a beautiful little portrait of a Wood Duck. The 2012 stamp won’t be out in time for Christmas, but the 2011 Stamp, with Hautman’s brother James’s painting of a regal pair of White-fronted Geese, would make a great stocking stuffer for conservationists.

Bird Kill at West Virginia Wind Farm

2011-10-28T01:27:00.003-05:00

(Transcript of Today's For the Birds program)

In 1970, when I was in college, we celebrated the first Earth Day. Our conservative Republican president coined the term “environmental wacko,” but during his Administration, the nation banned DDT and passed the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Environmental Policy Act, and Endangered Species Act. This was also when OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Companies, initiated the 1973 oil crisis. To conserve energy, Nixon lowered the speed limit to 55. We environmentalists felt optimistic, thinking the government was finally realizing how dire our dependence on oil was, and that they’d press industry to develop alternative, cleaner energy sources and to press auto and appliance manufacturers to make products more energy efficient. In 1975, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, nicknamed the CAFE standards, took effect. Auto manufacturers suddenly had to consider the fuel efficiency of their fleet. But when Chrysler released its minivan, Lee Iacocca managed to persuade Congress to define the minivan as a light truck rather than a passenger vehicle. SUVs were also defined as light trucks, giving these vehicles a much higher gas consumption allowance. Hummers weren’t even required to meet the light truck standards because of their extraordinary weight, so they got away with getting only 9 to 14 miles per gallon.

The 70s was when we should have been researching alternatives for producing electricity, too. Instead, we waited until things got dire, and then started building wind farms willy nilly, without having done the necessary research to create designs that would not kill large numbers of birds or bats. We do know that tall, lighted structures attract nocturnal migrants in large numbers, and the people operating wind farms have a mandate by the Migratory Bird Act to prevent fatalities as much as possible. Yet two weeks ago, at the Laurel Mountain wind farm near Elkins, West Virginia, there was a kill of hundreds of migrating birds by the wind turbines. I learned about this on a birding listserv on October 27, and contacted the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources. I directed my call to the scientist who had confirmed the kill, and left a message, but my call was returned by someone else in the department who instructed me to contact their public relations specialist. He said although he could confirm the kill, he wasn’t at liberty to disclose how many birds were killed or what species were involved until the federal investigation was closed. A couple of birding sources gave the number as either 484 or between 500 and 600, and indicated that the kill was due to a bank of bright lights used to provide illumination at a substation—apparently these lights are supposed to be turned off at night, but were left on in exactly the cloudy, low-visibility conditions associated with most bird kills.

I’m not sure why two weeks after the incident, details are still so sketchy. The optimism I felt as a college kid seeing the government respond to critical environmental issues, and the sense that government was requiring more openness and honesty, seem to have dissipated.

Sadly, reports indicate that most of the warblers killed were Blackpolls, an endangered species in nearby Pennsylvania. The Migratory Bird Act calls for a maximum $5000 fine and a six-month jail term for each violation. This act is vigorously enforced when it comes to individuals possessing feathers or individual birds, even when the people are trying to rescue a hurt bird. I know that corporations are legally considered people now, but my prediction is that Fish and Wildlife will not issue any fines or jail sentences in this case. I’d love to be proven wrong.

Conservation Big Year: 2013?

2011-10-26T23:39:00.004-05:00

(Transcript of For the Birds for October 27, 2011)

Ever since the movie The Big Year came out, people seem more interested in the hobby of birding. I’ve been getting questions from people who went out to try and identify birds after seeing the film, and The Atlantic had a great story about a guy doing a Big Year this year. As of October 26, 2011, John Vanderpoel has seen 729 species, and is in third place in the American Birding Association’s record book. As of last year, second place is owned by Bob Ake, with 731, and it looks like Vanderpoel will for sure reach that mark. With luck, he may even reach Sandy Komito’s all-time record of 745.

I’ve never considered doing a Big Year—I just don’t have that competitive fire in my belly to want to chase birds just to see more than anyone else even if I did have the kind of money necessary. I’m a proud member of the American Birding Association even though I never submit my lists. It’s not at all that I disapprove of competitive listing. Just because I enjoy shooting baskets with my kids but never aspired to play basketball competitively doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate NBA level basketball.

I’ve been mulling over the idea of doing a different kind of Big Year that isn’t competitive at all—a Conservation Big Year. What I’d like to do is spend a year trying to see all the North American species that are endangered, threatened, or of special concern. I’d try to get photos and video of each species on its breeding, staging, and/or wintering range, and write about each species and how it’s doing and what kind of help it’s getting from federal and state agencies and conservation organizations. I’m already too booked for 2012, so this would have to happen in 2013. This would of course involve a lot of travel, which would ironically squander a lot of energy, but I’d at least try to minimize the energy used in travel. I think the ticket one needs to do a Conservation Big Year is a Duck Stamp, because so many birds, from Whooping Cranes to Black-capped Vireos, live in National Wildlife Refuges funded by Duck Stamps. The trickiest part of course would be funding, so I’d try to get speaking gigs here and there along the way.

A year-long project like this could be a thrilling adventure, getting me into a lot of important habitats all over the country. I’d try to get to as many National Wildlife Refuges as possible, because they’re such an essential part of bird conservation. I wouldn’t need to go to Attu like the guys in the movie The Big Year—the rarities that turn up there are off-course migrants from Asia, most of which are doing well in their normal ranges. But it would bring me up to Alaska, some north Atlantic islands, and the Pacific coast. I’d get to spend time with Kirtland’s Warblers in Michigan, Lesser Prairie Chickens in Oklahoma, Sage Grouse in Colorado, puffins off the coast of Maine, and California Gnatcatchers on the Pacific slope. And of course I’d be seeing plenty of other birds wherever I was, so would almost definitely see over 600 species during the year.

My Conservation Big Year wouldn’t present the same difficulties as a competitive Big Year—I wouldn’t have to race off whenever a rare bird blows in on a spring storm. I’d have 14 months to plan it out so I could be at the best places at the best times to see each species when its singing or displaying was peaking. In the coming weeks I’m going to plot out a rough itinerary and see if this kind of thing would be at all feasible. I don’t know if my plans will firm up so I can really do this, but the more I think about it, the more excited I get.

Economizing on Optics

2011-10-26T00:26:00.003-05:00

Chandler Robbins's binoculars. I took this photo in Guatemala in 2007. He's been using the same inexpensive binoculars for decades, putting his money toward conservation rather than optics. Excellent optics are wonderful—don't get me wrong. But prioritizing how we spend our money is getting more and more critical for the 90 percent of Americans who aren't wealthy.

(Transcript of today's For the Birds)

This week people got into a testy exchange of ideas on the national birding listserv regarding what kind of binoculars to recommend to people. Most serious birders tell people to buy the very best binoculars they can afford, and in this discussion, one person said it was reasonable to spend about what you pay for a month’s rent or mortgage payment. I went to bed hungry as a little girl enough that I’m very aware that a hundred dollars is a lot of money for a lot of people. I’ve been lucky enough to have used some of the best binoculars in the world, and high-end binoculars costing over a thousand dollars really are the best, but it feels rude and presumptuous for me to tell someone that they need high-end binoculars when they can’t afford health care. Now that I haven’t worked for an optics company for four years, I’m completely out of touch with current binocular models. One that I recommended for years as the best binoculars for less than $100, the Leupold Yosemites, has new specifications and according to people I’ve talked to who have checked them out, the quality has plummeted dramatically. So I don’t even know what brands or models to recommend anymore.

But a few guidelines can help people on a serious budget to make a wise purchase. First, inexpensive pocket binoculars are virtually always a waste of money. Any objective lenses smaller than 30 or 32 millimeters, which is the second number in the normal description of binoculars, like 10x20, is not going to be able to gather enough light to give you a clear image—I’ve tested a lot of them, and they really show birds worse than using two toilet paper tubes, and I am not making this up. I was very disturbed several years ago when Audubon started sending particularly cheap binoculars out as a premium for joining—they were plastic with plastic lenses, you couldn’t adjust them for how far apart your eyes were, and looking through them actually hurt my eyes. It seemed ironic for a conservation organization to manufacture such worthless items and ship them to America from China in a container ship burning toxic bunker fuel.

Especially as more and more products, even from higher end companies, are being manufactured in China, you really can’t count on quality when you purchase anything but the most expensive binoculars. For a given amount of money, you’ll get a much better view with lower power glasses. I strongly recommend that if you’re spending less than $300 or so that you get seven power, not 10 x—for the same size binoculars, you’ll always get a brighter image and virtually always get a clearer image. And any compromises in glass grinding, alignment, or coatings will be less noticeable in lower power glasses. I usually leave my binoculars home now that I bring my camera birding, but the binoculars I do use are 6x32—they’re small, focus incredibly close for butterflies or birds at the window feeder, and have a great field of view.

My first pair of binoculars was a reasonably inexpensive pair of 7x50 Bushnell Instafocuses. They were huge, but I was young and didn’t mind lugging them around—those glasses gave me the first 357 species I saw on my lifelist. I’d recommend saving up to get binoculars in the $300 range or higher if you really want the added magnification of 10-power glasses. Also, make sure the eyecups push or twist in rather than being made of cheap rubber that rolls down. I don’t make commercial endorsements, but I know several people who work at Eagle Optics outside Madison, Wisconsin, and know they are birders who really understand optics and the best choices at each price point. If you’re on a serious budget, they’re going to be very helpful in steering you toward the best affordable pair. As I learned when I began, even a fairly inexpensive pair of binoculars can bring you years of satisfaction. After you open the box and make sure they’re aligned and working, forget about second guessing yourself and get out and start using them.

The Big Year: The Second Viewing

2011-10-25T03:13:00.001-05:00

(Transcript of today's For the Birds program)

This week Russ and I went to see The Big Year for the second time, after I re-read the book. We both still thoroughly enjoyed the movie, partly because of and partly despite the differences between the movie and the real story of the 1998 Big Year that the movie was based on.

I’ve never met any of the three real birders who tried to break the all-time record of birds seen in a single calendar year, though I once did a phone interview with Greg Miller, the birder played in the movie by Jack Black. Greg told me about his using police radar to clock a Peregrine Falcon in downtown Cleveland going over 240 miles per hour. Greg served as the bird consultant during filming The Big Year. Based on accounts by birders who know them personally and from the book, Greg Miller’s father was actually a birder himself who supported Greg’s Big Year from the start, unlike Brian Dennehy’s character in the movie. In the movie there was a beautiful scene with Jack Black and Brian Dennehy looking at a Great Gray Owl. This actually happened in real life much the way the movie portrayed, except the bird was actually a Long-eared Owl. The one distressing thing about that scene was that they used an animatronic owl, especially because it would have been very easy to get high definition video of a real Great Gray Owl. One thing that Duluth audiences picked up is that in the movie, Owen Wilson searches for a Snowy Owl in the Sax-Zim Bog, when serious birders would just about always search in the Duluth Harbor for the Snowy. That real life character’s nemesis bird was a Great Gray Owl, which he never saw that year.

The boggy area around Meadowlands known as the Sax-Zim Bog is mentioned a couple of times in the movie, and Owen Wilson’s character spends Christmas Eve in Duluth, having dinner in a Chinese restaurant. Although the scene wasn’t filmed in Duluth, the man the character is based on really did spend that Christmas Eve in Duluth, eating dinner at a Chinese restaurant, the only place he could find open that night.

In the movie, Angelica Huston plays Annie Auklet, who leads tours in Monterey Bay to help birders get oceanic birds. Her character is based on a pelagic trip leader whose name is Debi Shearwater. I know Debi—she’s a wonderful woman who really did have a feud with the man the Owen Wilson character is based on. She really did change her name to Shearwater because of her love for the birds, and except for her being a blonde, Angelica Huston seems to channel her in every way. Although the man Owen Wilson’s character is based on is actually a year older than the man Steve Martin’s character is based on, the movie did an excellent job of casting, in finding actors who bring out a lot of the characters of and dynamics between the real men that year.

The real Big Year took place in 1998, and many experts think Sandy Komito’s record 745 birds will never be broken. The El Nino that year brought amazing species to Attu, the farthest Aleutian Island, which is increasingly difficult to reach. And since 9/11, increased airline security has meant that people just can’t hop a jet whenever a rare bird turns up somewhere.

Although just about every birder I’ve talked to or seen online discussing the movie gave The Big Year a thumbs up, the movie hasn’t done very well nationally. Critics are giving it only a 40% on Rotten Tomatoes, and even audiences give it only a 55%. People at Zinema2, Duluth’s wonderful downtown theater, told me that although the film took in only $700 per theater nationally this past weekend, it brought in $2200 at Zinema, so they’re keeping it at least another week. On opening night, the theater was filled—that included a lot of people from Duluth Audubon and Hawk Ridge. At this Monday night’s showing there were still 20 people in the theater—pretty respectable for a weeknight. So oddly enough, Duluth may end up not just the place to go to see rare birds, but also to see movies about going to Duluth to see rare birds.

Chance Encounter (repeated from last year)

2011-10-20T08:38:00.004-05:00

(This is repeated from last year's For the Birds)

[I'm headed to Philadelphia for this weekend's conference, Focus on Diversity: Changing the Face of American Birding, so pulled up a rerun for today's and tomorrow's programs]

This fall [that is, fall 2010], I’ve been watching flocks of all kinds of birds, from huge groups of sparrows and juncos to this year’s unusually abundant Blue Jays. I tend to focus on groups of birds in autumn, and I think of migratory movements in terms of populations or species, not individuals. But this week I took notice of the particularity of one bird I came upon at the Port Wing marina.

This Snow Bunting had made a journey spanning a couple thousand miles to reach northern Wisconsin from his high arctic breeding grounds. His flickering white wing patches caught my eye as he picked off bugs clinging to the side of a bridge—a narrow but vertical structure far enough above the rocks that the bunting had to hover to snap them up. Most songbirds cannot hover for more than a few seconds, and by the time I got my camera focused, the little guy had dropped back down to the rocks.

Snow Buntings usually associate in flocks with other Snow Buntings and occasionally longspurs or Horned Larks. I see them most often on the stubble of farm fields long after harvest, the birds eking out their existence on waste seed and bugs. They’re especially drawn to fields after a farmer spreads manure, a veritable cornucopia of insects and semi-digested grass seeds, often steaming with warmth. Of course, the steam also carries a certain level of odor, but songbirds aren’t gifted in the olfactory department and their sensibilities not so rarified as ours, so they don’t seem to mind at all. The landscape would seem barren and desolate if not for these beautiful “snow flake” birds. When a flock of Snow Buntings feeds on the ground, those at the back fly forward to the front, making the flock appear to be rolling along. This would be beautiful enough if done by any other species, but reaches ethereal heights thanks to their flickering white wing patches.

Snow Buntings are usually very gregarious, but their flocks are like families of squabbling children. Even during the times of year when they’re not defending a territory, Snow Buntings almost continuously bicker with one another. Many flocking birds establish a hierarchy to reduce the conflicts, but Snow Buntings are too independent to submit to the rules a hierarchical society requires. Those of us who witness their skirmishes are treated to a lot of beautiful wing flashing. If we’re not paying attention, we may not catch on that the birds are fighting. So being in the presence of bickering buntings is far more pleasant than being stuck in a car with bickering children.

Snow Buntings breed in one of the harshest environments on the planet—the high Arctic. They nest under boulders in boulder fields, in cracks in large rock surfaces, or cliff faces. Temperatures in these nests can be very cold, so the buntings line their nests with thick insulating layers of feathers, mosses, and grasses.

I wanted to tease out the entire history of the Snow Bunting I was watching—he moseyed about, allowing me to take 122 photographs at close range over the course of an hour—but he wasn’t talking. He didn’t open his wings again for me, either—Snow Buntings spend most of their lives on foot. So I couldn’t verify by the size of his white wing patches that he was a male, though that is definitely the impression I got when I first saw him feeding. His cap didn’t seem quite dark enough for an adult male, but even that wasn’t definite in fresh fall plumage.

I was in Port Wing without my bird books, so I emailed my photos to my good friend Mike McDowell to see if he could figure out the bird’s age and sex. He wasn’t sure either, so he forwarded them to two top Wisconsin birders, Tom Schultz and Ryan Brady. Even though the photos show the bird very clearly, at high resolution and large size, none of us could be 100 percent certain without the bird in hand, though Ryan and Tom both had the impression of a young male, too.

This added a mysterious flair to my encounter. I’ll never know if this was his first migration or whether he’s a seasoned traveler, whether he got separated from others by accident or by choice, how he chanced to be at the Port Wing Marina exactly when I was there, or even if he was a “he” at all. And I’ll never recognize him again if I see him, alone or in a flock. It was one of those lovely brief encounters we make as we pass through this lovely little planet. I’ll always remember him—those photos turned out well enough that I’ll be referencing them for decades—but I found him far more interesting than he found me, so I’m sure the moment I moved on, he breathed a sigh of relief to have that intruder out of his face and simply moved on to the rest of his life.

Bird Feeding Primer

2011-10-20T00:35:00.003-05:00

(This is repeated from last year, podcast here.)

In autumn, a lot of people set up their old bird feeders and a lot of other people buy or build new feeders. Ever since Emily Dickinson tossed out crumbs to her sparrows, Americans have taken pleasure in feeding backyard birds. And like Emily Dickinson, the protective feelings we have toward birds are especially aroused by wintry weather.

Except for sick or injured birds that cannot leave our feeding stations, or out-of-range visitors that find themselves in habitat offering no sustenance for them, virtually every bird that visits our feeders gets most of its calories from more natural sources. People as a group are unpredictable and fickle, and even the most steadfast soul with a bird feeder might get sick or have to spend time somewhere else during winter, so birds unable to find enough natural food to survive usually migrate to where they can.

Birds really can survive perfectly well without our feeders, but they do get through the winter in better condition when they get some easy and nutritious calories every day. In one University of Wisconsin study, Black-capped Chickadees took about 21 percent of their daily calories from feeders and the rest from wild sources. That’s barely a fifth of their food, and the researchers found that when they removed feeders from a woodland where birds had been fed for the previous 25 years, chickadees quickly switched to natural food sources and survived the winter as well as chickadees that lived where no feeders had ever been placed. The researchers learned that during mild winters, survival rates between chickadees in areas with bird feeders are no higher than for chickadees living entirely without feeders, but during extremely harsh conditions, feeders did raise their survival rates.

A single bird feeder seldom attracts many birds, and it can take weeks or even months for birds to discover it, especially where habitat is poor. Overall, the most successful feeding stations provide a variety of feeders in different spots. Some species, such as native sparrows and doves, prefer feeding on the ground.

Some, such as Evening Grosbeaks, prefer platform feeders without roofs.

Some, such as chickadees and finches, don’t mind hanging feeders

while others prefer feeders to be firmly attached to something solid.

People often buy bird seed mixes, reasoning that the wider variety of seed choices will lure in a wider variety of species. But the bulk of inexpensive mixes is “filler” seed that few if any birds eat. These mixes cost far less per pound than sunflower, but so much is wasted that in the long run, they’re more expensive. And wasted seed decays, fostering bacteria and fungi. Normally the best seed choices are black oil sunflower and, if you have a lot of ground-feeding sparrows and doves, white millet.

Finches are especially fond of nyjer seed.

Woodpeckers, titmice, and jays also feed on suet.

I never buy suet cakes that have corn or peanuts. I only buy corn or peanuts graded for human, livestock, or pet consumption—those sold for wildlife feeding don’t need to pass inspection for aflatoxins—extremely dangerous byproducts of bacteria that thrive on corn and peanuts. Corn and peanuts sold for bird feeding never carry any kind of certification guaranteeing that they are free of aflatoxins, so I don’t feed corn and buy peanuts for feeding chickadees, jays, and squirrels from the grocery store so I know they’re safe. It would be ironic indeed to imagine myself helping my backyard birds while feeding them toxic food. Bird feeding can be wonderful for the birds and for those of us who watch them, but only if we're sure we're doing it right.

New Research on White-throated Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos

2011-10-19T01:57:00.002-05:00

(Transcript of today's For the Birds)

One of the abundant backyard birds in north country in October is our little White-throated Sparrow. Juncos are starting to outnumber them at feeders now, and by the time the first snow flies most of them will be further south, but these little stripe-headed guys are right now packing away almost as many seeds as their stripe-backed counterparts in the mammal world, the chipmunks.

White-throated Sparrows come in two color forms, one with bright white stripes on their heads,

and one with tan stripes.

Each color form makes up about 50 percent of the population, and each sex is represented by about 50 percent of each color form. Virtually 100 percent of all mated pairs include birds of opposite color as well as opposite sex—a system called negative assortative mating. Researchers find that the white-striped forms are very aggressive and territorial while the tan-striped birds are more nurturing and not particularly territorial. The human counterpart would be if Scarlett O’Hara always ended up with Ashley Wilkes while Melanie Hamilton always ended up with Rhett Butler.

All this has been known for a long time. But researchers are now finding an intriguing anomaly in White-throated Sparrow chromosomes. In mammals, the sex chromosomes X and Y match up when producing a male, and two X’s match up to produce a female; while in birds, the W and Z chromosomes match up when producing a female and two Z’s produce a male. Although our X and Y chromosomes or the W and Z chromosome counterparts in birds have very few genes in common, they match up during meiosis because they do have a small but critical area in common. In the exceptional case of White-throated Sparrows, another chromosome, Chromosome 2, acts like these sex chromosomes because of a weird phenomenon called a chromosomal inversion. The showy white-striped form birds have the heterozygous form, comparable to our male XY pairing, while the plainer tan-striped birds have the homozygous form like our female XX chromosome pairing. Scientists published a paper last week likening the Chromosome 2 situation to the sparrows having a second set of sex chromosomes, a fascinating possibility for a species with its unique assortative mating system. I think the media made it sound weirder and more sex-charged than it is, but it’s still interesting.

In another recent study, scientists found that male juncos have two spring songs. Birds in an area apparently sort out whose land is whose via their loud territorial song, and then they pretty much ignore each other when singing that tune. But each male also has a softer, more melodic song used to attract a mate. And juncos are very suspicious of every male singing that song and get far more aggressive when they hear it. Apparently they’re more concerned about defending their mate than their property.

When the October wind is rattling my windows and the leaves are piling up, my juncoes are not singing at all, and sparrow genes and chromosomes don’t interest me. These sturdy little beings scratching out their meals under my feeders are a warm and gentle reminder that winter is headed our way. Even as the thought makes me shiver, these warm little birds remind me that even tiny little bodies can survive just about anything Mother Nature can dish out. Thoreau described juncos as “Leaden skies above, snow beneath,” and when a flock takes off, their delicate white tail streamers moving in a flurry like so many snowflakes, I can’t help but remember just how beautiful snow can be.

Movie Review: The Big Year

2011-10-16T20:54:00.008-05:00

I wrote two For the Birds scripts about this movie, the first (For the Birds, October 18) to explain what a "Big Year" is, and the second (For the Birds, October 19) to review the movie. Following are both scripts:

Ever since Christopher Guest made Best in Show, I’ve longed for his troupe to make a movie about competitive birding. I thought the perfect vehicle would be a movie about a Big Day—probably the World Series of Birding, which takes place in New Jersey every year. The movie would show the teams preparing and then getting through the day. I cringe at the thought of Eugene Levy using his broad physical humor to make fun of a particularly nerdy type of birder, mainly because I know one nerdy birder that he could do a spot-on imitation of. There’d be the cutthroat competitors who keep every sighting close to their vest and are invariably among the winners, and the teams who share tips about every rarity with anyone they encounter and invariably never win. There’d be the teams who hear a single note or sight a bird for barely a second and race on—one of these teams is invariably the winner—and teams who stop and admire too many beautiful birds for too long—invariably not among the winners. It would have been so fun to see what kinds of birders Guest, Levy, Bob Balaban, Parker Posey, Michael Hitchcock, Catherine O’Hara, Michael McKean, John Michael Higgens, and the rest came up with.

My fantasy movie was never realized, but something even better is in theaters right now, in the form of The Big Year. Based on the book by Mark Obmascik, this movie captures the essence of three birders roughly based on three real men who, when they each independently realized that El Nino was likely to produce conditions for an amazing array of rarities to turn up in 1998, set out to see the most species ever recorded in a single year in North America. I’ll talk specifically about the movie tomorrow, but first want to provide listeners with a bit of history about what Big Years are all about.

Big Years are said to have originated in a roundabout way by Roger Tory Peterson and British ornithologist James Fisher. Peterson wanted to show off America’s fabulous birdlife to his friend, and so in April 1953, the two men embarked on a 100-day, 30,000-mile road trip around the continent recounted in the book Wild America. Thanks to that stupendous experience, Peterson tallied a total of 572 species for 1953. But he had not been the first to set a record for the number of species seen in North America in a single year. Guy Emerson, a businessman, timed his business trips to coincide with ideal times for birding in various areas of the U.S. In 1939, he set a personal record of 497. This was the number Peterson set out to beat in 1953 and kept track of throughout his adventure with Fisher, apparently not realizing that in 1952, Bob Smart had already set a new record of 510 species [according to Wikipedia. According to The Pettingell Book of Birding Records, Smart saw 515.] Peterson beat that record substantially, but his 572 only stood for three years. In 1956, a 25-year-old Englishman named Stuart Keith followed Peterson and Fisher’s route and tallied 598. This record stood for 15 years.

In 1969, the American Birding Association was born. Its inaugural edition of Birding magazine set ground rules for competitive birding in North America, defining the official ABA area as the 49 continental states and Canada, excluding Baja California, which Peterson and Fisher had spent time in. In 1971, 18-year-old Ted Parker, in his last year of high school, managed to get 626 species all within the ABA area, which he announced in the 1972 issue of Birding. That was like throwing down the gauntlet. In 1973, two different birders broke his record. Floyd Murdoch got 669 in the ABA area. Kenn Kaufman got a total of 671, but his number included 5 species seen only in Baja California—his ABA list was 666. Kaufman recounted the adventure in an extraordinary book, Kingbird Highway, which is as much a coming-of-age memoir as a birding adventure book.

Murdoch’s ABA area record was broken by James Vardaman, who saw 699 in 1979. That record was toppled four years later by former Duluth doctor Benton Basham, who tallied 710 in 1983, including a Boreal Owl along the Gunflint Trail. Basham had asked Kim Eckert to take him to see one, and Kim invited me and a couple of other lucky birders along. I’ll never forget that night—northern lights were streaming, an American Woodcock was alighting on the road right near us during interludes in his skydance, and Boreal Owl calls rang out, a thrilling sound for all of us, and filling me with the kind of joy Basham must have felt when he topped 700. In 1987, Sandy Komito broke that record with 721. He broke his own record with 745 in 1998—a record that still stands, and the feat recounted in Obmascik’s book, The Big Year. Tomorrow I’ll talk about the movie.

*****

A couple of years ago, news came out that Peter Frankel, who directed The Devil Wears Prada and Marley and Me, was going to direct a movie about Mark Obmascik’s book, The Big Year. Birders were immediately intrigued yet scared, many assuming that of course the movie would ridicule birdwatching. When the actors who would play the lead characters were announced, many birders got more scared—with Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson starring, the movie was clearly intended to be a comedy. The film crew hired Greg Miller as a birding consultant—he’s the birder Jack Black’s character was loosely based on—but many birders were increasingly certain the movie would poke fun at birding.

They needn’t have worried. There are certainly secondary characters in The Big Year who think birding is stupid, and you can’t blame them when these competing birders toss aside important business meetings and even one marriage when a rare bird is at stake. But the birders in The Big Year are unapologetic about their passion. To them, the joy of birding and the urge to break the record for the most birds seen in North America in a single year is as fundamental as is James Lovell’s yearning to reach the moon in Apollo 13 or the passion for fine wine by the characters in the movie Sideways. Birds and birding are integral to the movie, but the themes of the movie are more about passion and competition, the weird kinds of bonds that draw even heated contenders together, and what things are or are not worth sacrificing to reach a goal.

From the moment The Big Year starts, on New Year’s Day with Owen Wilson’s character in a remote park in Arizona to see a hard-to-get rarity, a Nutting’s Flycatcher, I was totally engaged in the movie. Steve Martin’s character celebrates a more family-oriented New Years, with toasts at midnight and then a family skiing outing, though he does stop a few times to add some birds to his year list. Jack Black’s character was stuck at work, and he only got a single bird out the window of his downtown office. As with the real men who inspired the movie characters, Steve Martin’s and Owen Wilson’s characters were very wealthy, and Jack Black’s had very little money and was just getting over a painful divorce. You quickly discern that it takes a lot of money to do a Big Year, and that some birders are as cutthroat as some contenders in sports. When a very rare tropical hummingbird turns up at a backyard feeder, Steve Martin gets there first and dutifully rings the doorbell and patiently waits for the homeowner to give him a key to her gate, politely submitting to a minute of chit chat, while Owen Wilson simply jumps over her fence and is in and out while Martin is still stuck at the door. A great many birders in the film are deeply resentful of Wilson’s character for how cutthroat he is in competition. But he is rather like the New York Yankees—he has way more money than most birders, makes the most of it, and can make life hell for some birders, yet despite their resentment, they can’t help but be regaled by his amazing experiences and give him plenty of begrudging respect along with resentment and even hatred.

The movie has some beautiful and touching moments. All three contenders stop, spellbound, gazing as courting Bald Eagles clasp talons in their aerial dance. And the movie has the sweetest scene involving a Great Gray Owl that I could imagine, though the owl moves more like an animatronic rather than a real flesh-and-blood owl.

The movie ends with photos of birds in rapid fire to the accompaniment of the song “This Could All Be Yours”—as lovely an invitation to start birding as I could imagine. The Big Year is a splendid movie for birders, and based on comments of non-birders I’ve talked to who saw it, plenty fun for regular people, too.

Robin Spectacle

2011-10-12T01:37:00.006-05:00

Transcript of today's For the Birds

A lot of people have been talking about lower numbers of a lot of species of songbirds, but one species no one is particularly worried about is the American Robin. Providing manicured lawns and ornamental fruit trees help robins to thrive. Their numbers are often the highest of any bird species wintering in the U.S. based on the Great Backyard Bird Count, which occurs in February.

A week or so ago, robins were so thick in my neighborhood that in a single day they devoured every single berry out of my neighbors’ yard—and they had at least three heavily-bearing trees. Hawks were also thick that day—while I was working at my desk, a Cooper’s Hawk chased one gorgeous adult male robin directly into my window at high speed. The poor bird hit so hard it crashed to the ground, but the hawk just moved on, leaving it in its death throes. After it died, I moved it to the back of the yard where something ate it within an hour, leaving nothing but a pile of feathers. Not once all day was there a single moment that I couldn’t hear robins everywhere. The next day they were gone, and I thought the biggest wave of them had passed through. It was close to the anniversary of October 1, 1988, when I was counting birds at the Lakewood Pumping Station up the shore a bit from Duluth and counted over 60,000 robins in five hours, along with 30,000 warblers and various other birds. I was in such a numerical daze when I got home that I walked smack into a bag of sunflower seeds and was up to something like 738 before I realized I was counting them as I swept them up.

But the big flight a week ago wasn’t the end of this year’s robin migration—this week another huge flood rushed though. On the first hour of counting at Hawk Ridge on October 9, the counters tallied over 12,000 robins migrating over the ridge and down in my neighborhood, which is between the main overlook and the lake. Robins rushed through all morning, and by noon, the counters simply put 30,000+ on the count board. They had plenty of other things to be paying attention to: on October 9, they also counted 478 raptors.

Meanwhile, down in my neighborhood, robins and Cedar Waxwings stripped the berries from my own mountain ash trees, dogwoods, and grapevine.

And the flight on October 9 had another witness. I got an email from Patty Mayer who wrote:

I live just above Skyline on the Duluth/ Proctor/ Hermantown border. At dusk I happened to glance out the window in the eastern sky and noticed a bunch of birds flying over. Not an uncommon sight this time of year, but they just kept coming. I ran outside to see them better: robins, and maybe some of their cousins. I watched what had to be THOUSANDS of birds fly over (heading SW). Too many to count as they flew, (1/2 block wide distribution) but there was a constant barrage flying overhead for literally five minutes or more. It was just so cool to see SO MANY flying right at dusk I wanted to share.

American Robins are abundant enough that a lot of us take them for granted. But this kind of breathtaking spectacle right in Duluth is one of the things that makes this city uniquely special. People grow ever more removed from nature with so many other things drawing our attention to the technological and economic. But anyone who didn’t stop and look up this week missed a thrilling experience.

Where are the birds?

2011-10-10T09:24:00.002-05:00

(Transcript of today's and tomorrow's For the Birds.)
People have been asking me for years why they seem to see fewer birds than they used to. This year I’ve heard from more people, from more places, asking this question than ever before.

To non-birders, birds seem plenty common—often too abundant. Canada Geese, Ring-billed Gulls, and American Robins have undergone something of a population explosion in recent decades. City pigeons, starlings, and House Sparrows are plenty common enough, at least in North America. Wild Turkeys are now found in areas where they never had been found in past decades or centuries, though many local populations aren’t truly established but continually augmented by hunting groups. I’m afraid in the future, Wild Turkeys may become every bit as much of an ecological hazard as white-tailed deer are now.

But meanwhile, a great many other birds are declining, some so significantly that we may face extinctions and dramatic extirpations in coming decades unless something is done. Sadly, the birds declining are species never mentioned in school science programs, and many educated adults have never heard of them, so Midwestern children have a more visceral reaction when they hear about impending extinctions of polar bears or penguins or the rainforest than they do about the plight of prairie-chickens or Upland Sandpipers.

But those of us who have been watching birds for a few decades can’t help but have noticed that before the 80s, we’d see spring warbler waves just about anytime we went out in May, while now even in major migration areas we just don’t see them as often as we used to. Evening Grosbeaks were abundant in the northland during the 70s and 80s—I used to get hundreds every day in late summer every year. This year I had a flock of about 16 stay in my area for almost 6 weeks. This was the first time in over a decade that I had more than one at my feeder at a time, and the first time in at least 15 years that grosbeaks remained here for longer than a few minutes. It was so exceptional that it literally made the newspaper.

With many declines, we have no idea what’s going on. In the case of Evening Grosbeaks, there is no hard and fast data about their abundance before the 70s, so we don’t know if populations may undergo long term cyclic declines and surges, or if the widespread decline since the 90s, documented over the entire eastern half of the continent, has been truly cataclysmic.

Species by species, we have to tease out the real losses from the apparent losses, to ensure that birds that are missing from one area haven’t simply moved on to another area. There have always been hurricanes, fires, and other catastrophes, and during human history, most species have rebounded after declines. Is it possible that some birds will reach the tipping point due to some combination of the changes in climate, pesticide loads and levels of other toxins, loss of habitat, outright mortality to windows, lighted communications towers, domesticated cats, and all the other changes people have wrought? And will we have enough warning to be able to prevent species losses?

That’s all impossible to say. But tomorrow I’ll be talking about how difficult it is for scientists to quantify how many birds have already disappeared.

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Yesterday I talked about declines in birds that used to be common in the upper Midwest. Our best tool for quantifying breeding birds is the Breeding Bird Survey, which was started in 1966 by one of my heroes, Chandler Robbins of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

There are 3700 roadside survey routes in the United States and Canada. Each one is 24.5 miles long, with 50 stops, each exactly one half mile apart. Participants run their route beginning at a set time before dawn on a reasonably calm, non-rainy day in June, pulling over at each stop to count every bird they see or hear in a three-minute period. Usually the participant has an assistant who writes down all the data. Obviously, some of the birds seen or heard are simply passing through, and many birds aren’t detected at all, but over time, because each route is run in the same sequence by the same experienced counters, these routes provide an excellent index of the number of birds holding territories along each route.

But the Breeding Bird Survey has some serious drawbacks. First, these roadside surveys are rerouted when necessary as various roads become more heavily used and thus more dangerous. My own route was rerouted as the dirt road it originally ran along was paved and got too busy. As necessary as this was, little by little rerouting compromises the data, because the routes were originally selected randomly, but now are skewing toward less developed areas and bird species less likely to associate with people.

Equally troublesome, the Breeding Bird Survey protocol is to count every singing bird, so a very high percentage of all the birds counted are breeding males on territory. This is exactly what the survey is designed to do, but there is no way of assessing how many floaters—that is, “extra” birds that don’t have available territories so aren’t singing—are out there. Of course, those birds quietly waiting in the wings are pretty much impossible to detect no matter what we do. But there is really good evidence that there used to be a lot of these floaters out there, and there probably aren’t nearly as many anymore. In his 1945 text, Modern Bird Study, Ludlow Griscom wrote:

An acquaintance of mine made a very interesting but somewhat cruel experiment some years ago with the Indigo Bunting. Finding a nesting pair near his house, he proceeded to shoot the male. The next day, the female had secured another male that sang in the same territory claimed by the first mate. He proceeded to shoot the second male. This kept on until he had shot nine different male Indigo Buntings, and he left the tenth male to help the female raise her family.

Griscom’s report predates the modern study of floaters—he was simply using this as an example of female songbirds being fickle. But it is an excellent example of a small study area in which at least nine males were present who were not detected until the male on the territory was removed.

Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing how old these males were. Current studies of Indigo Buntings indicate that virtually all males more than a year old have mates. Did there used to be a lot more males in the 1940s than there are now? There is no way of knowing for sure.

But Sydney Gauthreaux of Clemson University learned to analyze NEXRAD radar data to detect bird movements. He found that between the mid 1960s and the mid 1980s, the number of significant spring migration flights detected from his study area along the Gulf of Mexico had declined by almost 50 percent. He found a similar loss between the 80s and the new millennium. Although these are astounding numbers, and some scientists have questioned his techniques because the numbers don’t jibe with Breeding Bird Survey results, the truth is that his is the only objective data we have quantifying raw numbers of trans-Gulf migrants, including both floaters and breeding birds. Floaters provide an essential backup reserve population. I’m afraid we may be losing far more than people want to face. I hate doomsday reports, but unless we face bird declines square on, how can we possibly avert doomsday?

Beautiful cat needs a home

2011-10-04T08:39:00.002-05:00

Russ and I brought this beautiful cat home from Port Wing, where he had been hunting for birds and mice at my mother-in-law's, not very effectively judging from the fact that he's been declawed and is very emaciated. He's being treated for worms, got a rabies shot, and is overall healthy, except for one thing--he tested positive for FIV. That's the feline version of HIV, an immuno-response thing that can kill him, and is very transmissible to other cats (but not humans or dogs). So at our house he must be kept entirely separate from Kitty and Kasey. I have him in my office with me when I'm home, but it seems to stress Archimedes, so he can't be left in here when I'm not in the room.

What he desperately needs is a quiet loving home with no other cats (or only FIV+ cats) and probably no dogs, because even Photon frightens him--who knows what foxes, coyotes, bears, and even wolves he may have encountered before we found him. I've paid for his rabies shot, and will pay for distemper when he's up to it (he wasn't very cooperative at the vet yesterday), and will throw in a kitty gym that he likes if you have room for it. I sure hope I can find him a good home soon.

Better Angels

2011-10-04T00:55:00.003-05:00

(Transcript of today's For the Birds)
Over the years, a lot of people have asked me what I consider to be the fundamental difference between birds or other animals and human beings. Some religious philosophers have said we’re the only animals with souls. I’m not sure about that—some birds I’ve rehabbed, lived with, or watched in the wild have seemed genuinely soulful, and some sociopathic humans seem genuinely soulless, but either way, who am I to judge what a soul is? Some scientists have said birds have no emotions, but ironically, that is a profoundly unscientific belief. Animals share our biochemistry and the vast majority of our genome. To claim that every one of these non-human beings lacks emotions without experimental proof is not scientific. When we define love or fear or frustration or anger as uniquely human emotions, that’s linguistics, not science.

Some people say we differ from animals in our intelligence. On every measure of every form of intelligence, humans vary wildly. Our species includes rocket scientists, and we take pride in that although in my entire life I’ve only personally known one rocket scientist. As a species, we’ve certainly developed tools to a far more complex level than any other species on this planet has ever done, but I for one could never design and build a helicopter, and don’t have a clue how to use a lot of the tools my kids mastered in junior high school shop class. As far as technology goes, a lot of the things we’ve developed have in the long run done more to foul our nests or while away our hours in games that focus our intelligence on pointless exercises than to serve a useful end.

Some people say we’re the only species capable of altruism. They pooh-pooh cases of birds feeding nestlings that aren’t their own. The cardinal who lost his mate and young and spent a week or so stuffing food into the mouths of goldfish was simply making an innate hormonal response to the color and size of their mouths, which are similar to that of baby cardinals. The screech-owl who incubated flicker eggs, brooded the nestlings, and tried to feed them chunks of mouse was just making the same kind of innate hormonal response. I’m a human, whose behavior is supposedly not dictated by biology but by something unique to us, yet I remember just how gentle and nurturing and altruistic I was when I was pumped up with maternal hormones. I think a lot of our altruism is directly connected to how dependent our species’ young are for well over a decade, requiring a more consistent long-term uninterrupted nurturing impulse than species need when their young are dependent for just days, weeks, or months. Groups of Blue Jays and crows have both been known to help take care of injured or sick members of their flocks, even when not related to them. They aren’t so merciful when encountering an unfamiliar injured or sick bird, but our own empathy and altruism extend more powerfully toward family and friends than strangers, too. My golden retriever Bunter would find me and anxiously lead me to whatever room baby Blue Jays were if they happened to be hungry.

I used to agree with those who say the difference between animals and humans is that we have a conscience. But what is a conscience? If we must be taught right from wrong, by parents, a religion, or other outside source, then conscience isn’t intrinsic. Whether conscience is a gut feeling about what we should and should not be doing or an internal reminder of external rules, the difference between us and other animals isn’t that we’re the only ones with a conscience—it’s that we’re the only animals who can defy our conscience. We’re far from the only animals who can do right, but we are the only animals who can do wrong. When we appeal to our better angels to help us do the right thing, it might help us to remember that those angels are virtually always depicted with bird wings.

Birds killed at greatest frequency at towers

2011-10-03T22:11:00.007-05:00

This is from an American Bird Conservancy report, COMMUNICATION TOWERS: A DEADLY HAZARD TO BIRDS

List of Species Killed at Towers Documented by 47 Studies.
The first 60 species listed by number killed, in descending order:

Ovenbird 22619

Red-eyed Vireo 19707

Tennessee Warbler 17689

Common Yellowthroat 10397

Bay-breasted Warbler 10396

American Redstart 8392

Blackpoll Warbler 6304

Black-and-white Warbler 6099

Philadelphia Vireo 4317

Swainson's Thrush 3943

Palm Warbler 3441

Gray Catbird 3238

Northern Waterthrush 3148

Northern Parula 2662

Magnolia Warbler 2630

Connecticut Warbler 2624

Blackburnian Warbler 2538

Ruby-crowned Kinglet 2336

Yellow-rumped Warbler 2287

White-eyed Vireo 2222

Cape May Warbler 2199

Black-throated Blue Warbler 2061

Indigo Bunting 1892

Unidentified Birds 1833

Gray-cheeked Thrush 1793

Rose-breasted Grosbeak 1580

Veery 1511

Chestnut-sided Warbler 1426

Savannah Sparrow 1335

Black-throated Green Warbler 1330

Hooded Warbler 1245

Solitary Vireo 1220

Bobolink 1201

Nashville Warbler 1098

Golden-crowned Kinglet 1071

Prairie Warbler 1018

Orange-crowned Warbler 959

Marsh Wren 888

Swamp Sparrow 850

Mourning Warbler 814

House Wren 804

Yellow-throated Vireo 801

White-throated Sparrow 797

Chipping Sparrow 733

Canada Warbler 689

Wood Thrush 684

Sora Rail 657

Scarlet Tanager 615

Grasshopper Sparrow 582

Yellow-billed Cuckoo 568

Kentucky Warbler 568

Traill's Flycatcher 545

Golden-winged Warbler 542

Prothonotary Warbler 476

Wilson's Warbler 466

Lincoln's Sparrow463

Song Sparrow 422

Yellow Warbler 419

Red-winged Blackbird 410

Brown Thrasher 376

Northern Oriole 362

AT&T appeals BWCA tower case

2011-10-03T07:07:00.001-05:00

(Transcript of today's For the Birds)

Last year, AT&T asked Lake County for a permit to construct a communications tower just off the Fernberg Road, near Ely. AT&T told Lake County that the tower was essential for public health, safety and welfare, and that there was no feasible alternative to a 450-foot tower. Lake County approved the project, but then the Friends of the Boundary Waters sued under the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act, asking that AT&T be allowed to build one or two towers in the area no taller than 199 feet. They produced evidence, in an analysis that was not disputed by AT&T during the actual court case, that a single 199-foot tower would provide fully 83% of the cell phone coverage of the proposed 450-foot tower, and that if AT&T built two 199-foot towers, they could in fact provide more coverage than their single proposed 450-foot tower. Again, AT&T did not dispute this in court. Rather, they noted that building two shorter towers would amount to a financial hardship of "extraordinary magnitude." Under cross examination, they testified that they had done an economic analysis of the two 199-foot tower alternative and decided against it because the return on their investment would be 63 months, missing their corporate profit benchmark by 3 months.

On September 29, AT&T announced that they were appealing the ruling. They plan to construct the approved 199-foot tower, but if they receive a favorable ruling, they will dismantle this tower to construct a 450-foot tower on the same site. In a case of what appears to be fuzzy math, their accountants believe that building two 199-foot towers would be more expensive than building one 199-foot tower, tearing it down, and building one 450-foot tower, along with a pile of legal costs to boot. Of course, constructing two towers also involves the cost of purchasing or leasing additional property, but I suspect AT&T’s real motives have less to do with saving money than saving face and trying to kill a precedent that communications towers can be visual blights and harmful to birds. The judge’s ruling mostly focused on, first and foremost, the harm to the wilderness vistas of a guyed, lighted tower, weighed against the fact that AT&T could provide similar coverage with a tower short enough to stand without guy wires and lights, but he also ruled that the lighted, guyed proposed tower would have an unacceptable impact on migratory birds given that the alternative plan would not be expected to harm any migratory birds at all. I testified on behalf of Friends of the Boundary Waters regarding a tower’s potential impact on birds, and Judge Bush specifically quoted my report stating that of the 30 bird species most frequently killed at towers, 28 breed in the Boundary Waters—a figure that is accurate and wasn’t disputed by AT&T’s ornithologist. However, AT&T’s witness estimated that no more than 48 birds would be killed in any given year at the proposed tower. The judge wrote in his ruling that “He is a private consultant who works and testifies exclusively for the wind and cell-tower industries. The Court does not find Kerlinger's opinions about very low probable bird mortality at the Proposed Tower to be credible.”

AT&T hasn’t officially filed their appeal yet, so I’m not exactly certain what legal basis they have. Judge Bush’s 58-page ruling, which can be read in its entirety on a PDF file linked on my blog, showed how carefully he listened to the arguments of both sides and carefully weighed all the evidence. AT&T’s belief that they can pay for a 199-foot tower, then tear it down to build a 450-foot tower, plus pay all their legal fees seems like a pretty clear case that they could have built two 199-foot towers in the first place. I hope the appeals court sees that.

[A full copy of Judge Bush’s ruling can be seen here: http://www.friends-bwca.org/FBWW-v-ATT-Order-Aug-3-2011.pdf]