Category: Birds and Birding

Pragmatism

I’m catching up with the Cornell Lab’s new birding blog, Round Robin, so this posting on Ken Otter’s research into wildlife impacts of wind turbine facilities has been out there a little while.

Even though wind power is a green energy source that we’re right to feel enthusiastic about, it does have a cost that can be minimized. Different settings – shapes of ridgelines, prevailing wind patterns, migratory routes – mean that each new wind farm will present different hazards to birds. But with a little forethought and brain power, we can reduce the costs birds pay to satisfy our own energy demands.

One incremental change

Bobolinks and other migratory songbirds are getting clobbered by pesticide use outside of the United States, beyond the protections offered (such as they are) by federal regulations, as Bridget Stutchbury notes in an op-ed piece for the Times.

Since the 1980s, pesticide use has increased fivefold in Latin America as countries have expanded their production of nontraditional crops to fuel the demand for fresh produce during winter in North America and Europe. Rice farmers in the region use monocrotophos, methamidophos and carbofuran, all agricultural chemicals that are rated Class I toxins by the World Health Organization, are highly toxic to birds, and are either restricted or banned in the United States.

Stutchbury cites research by Rosalind Renfrew of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies.

What’s a consumer to do? Look for shade-grown, organic coffee, and organic bananas. Conventionally-grown bananas are typically produced “with one of the highest pesticide levels of any tropical crop.”

I found organic bananas at my local Giant Food next to to the conventionally-cropped fruit, shrouded in plastic bags to discourage price tag switching.

Upcoming: 6

I really don’t spend as much time out in the field actively birding as I would like to, but I like to make time for Cornell’s Great Backyard Bird Count, which is held each February over the Presidents’ Day weekend. I’ve done a couple of Christmas Bird Counts, but the GBBC has some advantages. I’m in control of the when and the where—I can bird anywhere I like, for as little as 15 minutes at a time, any time in the course of the weekend. The Christmas counts have an air of friendly competition, and that’s fine, but the GBBC is more about reconnecting with your local habitat.

There is a half-mile stretch of blacktop trail along The Glade (a tributary of Angelico Branch) that I like to work for the GBBC. It’s mixed hardwoods with some open patches, so it’s usually good for the area’s common winter birds of the suburbs, including (most years) a Red-Shouldered Hawk. I can take a side trip to Lake Audubon to count geese and hope for some ducks. And this is all just a five-minute drive from my house.

Another thing that I like about the GBBC is that it provides a clearer picture of wintering populations. The Christmas counts always pick up a few stray migrants—indeed, that seems to be the big attraction, for some people.

So look for me in the field on the weekend of 15 to 18 Februrary, doing my little sliver of citizen science.

Go birding

Via Via Negativa: Peaceful Societies reports on the unexpected popularity of birding among the Amish of eastern Ohio, especially the Christmas Bird Count (CBC).

The center of the Amish birding activity is Holmes County, where [Bruce] Glick indicates that “the list of rare birds … is amazing.” The Holmes County list includes such unusual species such as the swallow-tailed kite, long-billed curlew, groove-billed ani, violet-green swallow, Harris’s sparrow, and golden eagle.

* * *

Glick points out that while many birding groups focus on rare and unusual sightings, an even more important aspect of the Ohio Amish counting is the fact that they record many more individual birds than most other counts. The Amish CBCs have recorded the most numbers of individual birds for 20 different species in the state of Ohio. Very common woodland birds such as downy woodpeckers, white-crowned sparrows, golden-crowned kinglets, tufted titmouses, pileated woodpeckers, and red-bellied woodpeckers are recorded more often in the Amish counts than anywhere else in the state.

Referenced by the post: Glick, Bruce. 2007. “Christmas Bird Counts in Ohio’s Amish Country.” American Birds 61, The 107th Christmas Bird Count Issue: 26-29.

More wheat and birds

The Birding Community E-Bulletin points to a press release by Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) that reports evidence of nesting activity by Long-billed Curlews (Numenius americanus) in fields of winter wheat.

Winter wheat acres have been increasing with continued success in Prairie Canada. Reduced pesticide input costs, the ability to spread the workload and improved marketing opportunities are factors in the crop’s expansion. These factors have contributed toward winter wheat providing superior financial returns compared to spring wheat alternatives. Producers involved in a recent DUC winter wheat program made $27/ac more on winter wheat than they did on spring wheat. The crop is of specific interest to DUC since it is seeded in the fall and remains generally undisturbed through the following growing season when most birds are nesting. It also provides a more attractive nesting habitat for ducks than spring-seeded cropland.

The Bulletin comments:

When the nesting-season starts for many species, winter wheat has already had a head start growing, and is ready to provide nesting cover for grassland birds early in the season. By the time winter wheat harvest begins, in mid-July in the Dakotas, for example, young birds nesting in the wheat fields are either developed enough to avoid harvest combines, or else have already fledged from the fields. In contrast, alfalfa, which reaches harvest height in May, is typically cut within the first 10 days of June – a dismal predicament for nesting birds and young in areas like the Dakotas….

U.S. farmers annually plant about 40 million acres in winter wheat. Across Canada, more than 1.2 million acres of winter wheat is grown. Is this great for birds? No, it’s a monoculture. Nevertheless, it is a somewhat attractive crop , and one that usually reaches a suitable height at the right time of year to benefit breeding birds. It is a crop that won’t be harvested until most nesting birds safely fledged their young. Winter wheat will never be a substitute for idled grassland, like CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) land, but if cropland goes into a rotation with winter wheat, there may actually be some benefits for certain ground-nesting birds. (It should also be noted that farmers usually don’t plant winter wheat in the same field in consecutive years.)

Wildlife and wind power in California

The California Energy Commission has adopted a set of voluntary guidelines for wind power projects in the state, as reported by The Birding Community E-Bulletin. The document’s abstract:

These voluntary guidelines provide information to help reduce impacts to birds and bats
from new development or repowering of wind energy projects in California. They
include recommendations on preliminary screening of proposed wind energy project
sites; pre-permitting study design and methods; assessing direct, indirect, and
cumulative impacts to birds and bats in accordance with state and federal laws;
developing avoidance and minimization measures; establishing appropriate
compensatory mitigation; and post-construction operations monitoring, analysis, and
reporting methods.

The guidelines were developed in conjunction with the California Department of Fish and Game.

Upcoming: 5

Big Sit! birding events are scheduled for October 7 at Huntley Meadows Park, sponsored by the Northern Virginia Bird Club (see the August edition of the newsletter for details), and for October 14 at the National Wildlife Visitor Center at Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel, Md (more info at the Refuge’s events page). In contrast to more active birding events,

Some people have called it a “tailgate party for birders….” The simplicity of the concept makes The Big Sit! so appealing. Find a good spot for bird watching—preferably one with good views of a variety of habitats and lots of birds. Next you create a real or imaginary circle 17 feet in diameter and sit inside the circle for 24 hours, counting all the bird species you see or hear. That’s it. Find a spot, sit in it, have fun.

THE BIG SIT! is like a Big Day, or a bird-a-thon in that the object is to tally as many bird species as can be seen or heard within 24 hours. The difference lies in the area limitation from which you can observe. THIS FREE EVENT is OPEN to every person and club in any country!

Thump

Ellen Barry and James Estrin follow Colin Grubel, graduate student in biology at Queens College, to Swinburne Island in Lower New York Bay. Swinburne hosts a colony of Double-Crested Cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus), whose numbers have rebounded, like those of other top predators, in response to the DDT ban. Grubel’s field work involves collecting cormorant boli, in order to determine what food items they’re taking. (And thus perhaps to foster greater acceptance of the birds by fishermen, who see them as competition.) Fortunately for Grubel, the birds are very forthcoming with their regurgitation.

“I’ve been hit on occasion,” he said. “In some ways it’s almost this great personal experience between you and the birds.”

Some links: 19

Via Laura’s Birding Blog, David Sibley summarizes research about what kills birds. The design of the bar chart is unfortunate: Sibley is apparently trying to use bar lengths to represent estimated values in most cases and error ranges in others. Nevertheless, the take-away is that some of the high-profile causes of avian mortality (oil spills, collisions with wind turbines) are minor compared to the tolls taken by feral and domestic cats, and by collisions with windows.

They live and work among us

In the course of tracking down a reference to a recent presentation he made on API design, I found the birding category of Elliotte Rusty Harold’s Mokka mit Schlag. He found the Western Reef Heron that’s been hanging around in Brooklyn, and thoughtfully included directions to one of the hot spots from the D train Bay-50th St station.

IBWO spotted in Maryland

…traveling about 65mph, riding on the back of a Toyota. It turns out that the state of Arkansas has issued a license plate with a design that features the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Hmm. Virginia has plate designs that feature Mallard and Northern Cardinal, and West Virginia has a nice Rose-breasted Grosbeak plate. It’s not entirely clear what sort of heron Maryland was going for with its Chesapeake Bay plate. I wonder how long a list one could compile from plates of the 50-plus states, districts, and territories. Here’s the place to start looking.

Still counting

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Environmental Impacts of Wind-Energy Projects, is in pre-publication. As summarized in the press release, the study examined onshore projects only, and concluded that wind projects will have a measurable impact on CO2 emissions by 2020 but will not reduce sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxide levels.

The report seems to haver on the effects on vertebrate populations—birds and bats:

… the committee saw no evidence that fatalities from existing wind facilities are causing measurable changes in bird populations in the United States. A possible exception is deaths among birds of prey, such as eagles and hawks, near Altamont Pass, Calif.—a facility with older, smaller turbines that appear more apt to kill such birds than newer turbines are.

Too little information is available to reliably predict how proposed new wind projects in the mid-Atlantic highlands would affect bird populations…

Lafayette trip report: 3

I closed out my field trips at the convention with a bang on Sunday, riding a van driven by Donna Dittmann and Steve Cardiff into Jeff Davis, Calcasieu, and Cameron Parishes west of town. We hit the farmland (much of it in rice) and refuge impoundments and saw a surprising variety of birds from various families, some of them I expected and some that I didn’t—American Coot (Fulica americana) (known locally as the “Ivory-Billed Gallinule”), the spectacularly-plumed Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus), shorebirds, waders, Dickcissel (Spiza americana), grackles, larids, and the “wow” bird of the trip, Northern Caracara (Caracara cheriway). We saw phalaropes doing their signature spinning; stilts on the nest; a mixed flock of cormorants, ibis, spoonbills, and egrets scaring up food; a nighthawk hunkered down on a fencepost; Cattle Egrets (Bubulcus ibia) actually hanging out with cattle. Donna pointed out some remnants of damage from Hurricane Rita, but we remained 30 miles inland or so, so we didn’t see the evidence that Amy Hooper witnessed on her field trip to the coast. The casualty of the trip was the tripod mount from my scope, which shattered (probably as a result of my abuse), but it’s all good, ’cause the mount never worked that well for me. I exceeded my best expectations for lifers for the whole convention, crashing through the 350-species milestone to end at #357.

looking for warblersWe spent the day before east of Lafayette in the Atchafalaya Basin. We scraped up some warblers and my target bird for the trip, Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris), on a walk led in part by Jim Delahoussaye, who lives along the river. (I first saw this bunting in a movie (maybe it was one of the Batman flicks), and when I saw this impossible-looking bird, colored with blocks of green and cherry red and electric blue, I figured that I must be looking at CGI effects.)

fire antsJim helped illustrate why you don’t want to step on the fire ant mounds.

on the bayouThen it was on to the water in a flotilla of three gas-powered flatboats. I didn’t see anything new here, though someone eared a Blue-winged Warbler (Vermivora pinus). But, as my seatmate Dick put it, this part of the trip was “kinda touristy, but cool.” Our destination, such as it was, was a Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) nest. When boatman Jacques finally cut the engine, the stillness was so deep that we could hear the eagle vocalizing.

I got lucky and had great weather for the whole trip, in the sense that I wasn’t birding in the rain or in a 30-knot gale. The storms that blew through came on our off day. The hardcore among us took the frontal movement as a cue to hare off into Cameron Parish hoping for a fallout. And the mosquitoes behaved themselves!

On Friday, David Sibley presented on the confusions, delusions, and self-fulfilling expectations of field ID, and told some entertaining war stories, including one about the time that he identified a bit of red flagging tied to a barbed-wire fence as a Vermilion Flycatcher. My subtitle for the talk would be, “Why You May Not Want to Scramble Off to Delaware Every Time Someone Reports a Rarity on the Hotline.”

The highlight of Friday’s chalk talks was a short presentation by Keith Ouchley of the Nature Conservancy on the natural provinces of coastal Louisiana—the alluvial valley (a/k/a bottomland hardwood forest), the savannah-like longleaf pine forest, and the coastal prairies and marshes. Each has been transformed in its own way by agroforestry, as the tallgrass prairie has been converted to rice and sugar cane farming; the pine woods planted in faster-growing loblolly pine; and the alluvial region literally burned to make room for soybeans. We learned that Red-cockaded Woodpecker (Picoides borealis), a pine woods specialist, is responding to artificial nest cavities built into the trunks of trees.

Lafayette trip report: 2

lunch breakTuesday morning our bus departed at 6:00 for Iberia Parish and the coastal wetland habitat of Lake Fausse (pronounced like the choreographer) Pointe State Park, followed by a visit to Avery Island, the site of a managed heron rookery (lots of puffball Great Egret chicks) and the McIlhenny family’s Tabasco sauce plant. I picked up my first lifer for the trip, Swallow-tailed Kite (Elanoides forficatus) while most of the bus was checking out the gift shop. Also feeding young, on the water, were a pair of Common Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus). Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotaria citrea) is a regional specialty, and we got up close and personal looks both on Tuesday and Thursday.

One of the things a convention is meant to do is charge you up to continue doing what you’ve been doing, and the workshops on Wednesday by Andy Farnsworth and Brian Sullivan, both with the ornithology lab at Cornell, did just that. Brian’s presentation on technology and birding touched on some of the cool gadgets that we birders with too much disposable income can play with (the Zeiss integrated spotting scope and digital camera is so tempting), and then segued into sources of information on the web (more in a later post) and eBird, Cornell’s web-powered bird observation listing application. eBird’s not-so-hidden agenda is data collection for research purposes, and I left with a mild resolution to start using it to record my Huntley Meadows visits, in the same way that I report nest box activity with the allied app for cavity nesting. But the app is lacking the capacity to export trip reports as URLs (although Brian told me that there’s interest in adding this feature); once Cornell does this, they’ll join the ranks of other players in the social software arena.

Andy Farnsworth covered two areas of his research, monitoring bird migrations using WSR-88D weather radar and by recording flight calls. He talked about all the things that can show up on radars that are neither weather nor birds, like “aerial plankton” (dust, smoke, insects) and sunset, which at the right time of day looks like back-scattered radiation. I found his segment on flight calls particularly interesting, because it was the first time I’d taken the time to look at a sound spectrogram while I’m listening to a vocalization. And since flight calls are briefer (as short as 0.02 sec) and simpler in structure, it’s easier to match sight and sound. Andy indicated that you want to look at the strong central trace of a spectrogram and discount the fainter overtones above and below it (on the other hand, the Eastern Bluebird chip that he played seemed to get its melodic character from the fainter traces in the spectrogram). A buzzy call will show regular variation in the frequency domain, perhaps 1kHz up and down each 1-5 msec. These are the calls we like to call “zeeps”, while the “seeps” stay on one pitch.

Thursday’s field trip took us past the oil refineries, chemical plants, and paper mills of Baton Rouge, up Highway 61, into West Feliciana Parish and the Tunica Hills, glacier-formed uplands (we stopped before we got to Angola and the state pen). We alighted at Oakley Plantation, once a home of John J. Audubon, and Mary Ann Brown Preserve, a Nature Conservancy property. Oakley was particularly pleasant, still cool and dripping from the cold front that blew through Wednesday bringing thunderstorms. Off by myself while most of us scattered to take the house tour or check out the gardens, I got a good look at a Red-headed Woodpecker and all too quick a look at a gray-over-yellow warbler that I couldn’t ID. Similarly, at Brown Preserve, the group saw a waterthrush that our leader ID’d as Louisiana, but I didn’t feel like I’d seen enough of the field marks to tick it. The last planned stop of the trip at Sherburne WMA was nearly a complete washout, as poor scouting on someone’s part left our motor coach unable to get over a steep railroad grade crossing.