Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2020 i BirdWatching

Construction of the southern border wall has accelerated across the borderlands despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Hundreds of miles of new construction have been announced in recent months, including through the remote Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Tinajas Altas Mountains, and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southern Arizona. The Trump administration’s latest plan for the wall, which would wall off the last jaguar migration paths and bulldoze Arizona’s Sky Island mountains, has drawn opposition from thousands of people across the country. The Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, and Sky Island Alliance submitted more than 8,200 comments from people opposing President Trump’s waiver of dozens of environmental and public health laws and calling for an immediate halt to wall construction. And in mid-May, three conservation groups sued the administration for…

Aside from my wife (his daughter), a passion for college football, and a vast amount of mutual respect, my father-in-law, Bob Ellis, and I have little in common. He’s a retired engineer, rancher, and agricultural consultant who considers a creaky gate latch a challenge to be addressed. Me? I regard a malfunctioning gate as an irritation to be avoided by using another gate if a shot of WD-40 can’t fix the problem. He’s an avowed Trumper, I’m a registered Democrat who votes environment first. But every evening on a recent trip to California, Bob and I find common ground in the chairs beside the pool and sip an excellent Central Coast Chardonnay while we watch the local California Quail come in to roost in “Mer,” the Boone and Crocket-class climbing…

This year, a lot of birders have come to realize that when we have no place to go, we might as well pay closer attention to the place we’re at. I normally spend spring and summer traveling and, when home, visiting wonderful birding spots in my own area. But during this year of hunkering down, sad as it was to cancel travel plans and miss some of my favorite birding experiences, I set new goals: seeing, photographing, and making sound recordings of as many birds as possible in my own backyard. Instead of maximizing the number of species I’m seeing week after week, I’m trying to maximize the quality experiences I’m having with individual birds right here at home. I’ve heard from many other people who are doing the same…

The bird brain has been an enigma for years. We now know that avian neurobiology got off on the wrong foot in the late 1800s, making some incorrect assumptions that remained basically unchanged for about 100 years. Led by Germany’s Ludwig Edinger, early biologists were greatly influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution and Aristotle’s Scala Naturae. They expected each vertebrate group to retain parts of the primitive brain and add more complex structures. Brain complexity would increase in a step-wise, linear fashion from the primitive fish brain to amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, peaking with primates and humans. They were surprised to find the bird brain so different from the mammalian brain. The structured cortex in the mammalian cerebrum (now called pallium) was laminar, arranged in six layers with nerve…

Scientists have published a number of notable papers in recent months that further enhance our understanding of bird migration. Here are three examples: • In northern Alberta, American Robins are responding to climate change by migrating five days earlier per decade in spring than they did in the early 1990s, according to a study in Environmental Research Letters. “It’s not entirely surprising that robins appear to be migrating through boreal Canada earlier because other studies have found that many bird species are adjusting their migration timing,” says lead author Ruth Oliver. “However, our study suggests that robins are able to adjust their migration timing by responding to environmental cues along the way, primarily snowmelt. This suggests that robins may be able to keep pace with the rapid environmental change occurring…

YELLOW CARDINAL SIGHTING In early April, two sisters from Boynton Beach, Florida, discovered a yellow male Northern Cardinal in their yard. The bird showed up a day after they put a new homemade feeder in the yard, and it stayed around for a few days. By our count, it is at least the 17th yellow male cardinal reported in southern and eastern states since 2016. The bird’s coloration is the result of a rare genetic mutation called xanthochroism — when yellow or orange plumage replaces a bird’s normal colors. In cardinals, the mutation is exceptionally rare. ENDANGERED VULTURE CHICK HATCHES One of the zoos that is most famous for its work to prevent the extinction of the California Condor is celebrating the hatching of another endangered vulture in its care:…

AS a child, I regarded wild birds as the ultimate symbols of freedom. I wasn’t allowed to cross the street, but these feathered free spirits could pick up and fly to anywhere on Earth; they could fly to heaven and back, it seemed, soaring with the angels. Chafing against restrictions, I dreamed of the absolute liberty of flying away like a wild bird, never to return. Once I grew up and started reading ornithology texts, I learned that that complete freedom was an illusion. Every bird species was bound by instincts, tied into predictable patterns of occurrence. In theory, this chickadee could leave its flock, that cardinal could leave its territory and just start flying in a new direction. In practice, they almost certainly would do nothing of the kind.…

IT was with a knowing smile that I read Brian Magnier’s entertaining article, “A Birder Discovers Butterflies,” in the May/June 2019 issue of BirdWatching because a few summers ago, I had traveled down a parallel path, only to arrive at a very different and unforeseen destination — odonata, the insect order comprising dragonflies and damselflies. I have been a lifelong adult birder, perhaps the more passionate because I had not been exposed to the wonder of birds as a child. For 40 years, I’ve relished the intellectual stimulation of studying birds, the physical activity of searching for them, and the adrenaline surge of actually finding new ones. Like Brian, I had covered most of North America, and I had even made a few forays out of the country, but I,…

Members of the titmouse family are among the most familiar and popular backyard birds across North America. The best known undoubtedly are the chickadees, a handful of dark-capped sprites that flock to feeders over most of the U.S. and Canada. The crested titmice of the genus Baeolophus are not quite so numerous or widespread, but they are welcome backyard visitors over much of the lower 48 states and southeastern Canada. The five species form a distinct group within the family. All have short crests they can raise or lower at will. One species, Bridled Titmouse, is about the size of a chickadee, but the other four all average larger. Bridled often forms flocks of more than half a dozen in the non-breeding season, as chickadees do, but the other four…

In many parts of the world, goats damage fragile bird habitat. With the right balance, though, animal husbandry can benefit threatened bird species. Case in point: Kirtland’s Warblers on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera — one of the few places where the recently delisted, range-restricted songbird winters. Edrin Symonette is a goat and sheep farmer, artist, and citrus grower on the island. “My father farmed when I was a kid,” he says. “At the time, I hated farming. Then I had the opportunity to go to school on a scholarship and run track at Hampton University in Virginia. When I came home one holiday, I fell in love with goats and animal husbandry, and then later returned to farming.” One day 18 years ago, Symonette met two biologists who had…

Much has been written in recent months about the fact that more people than ever seem to be watching birds, largely because so many of us have been under stay-at-home orders and have been noticing the birds in our yards and neighborhoods. The results of an annual event for birdwatchers — the Global Big Day on May 9 — further proves that the trend is real. This year, Global Big Day set a new world record for birds documented in a single day. Participants reported 2.1 million bird observations, recording 6,500 species. An all-time high of 50,000 participants submitted more than 121,000 checklists, shattering the previous single-day checklist total by 30 percent. Sightings were submitted to eBird, which uses the data to power science, outreach, and conservation efforts around the…

Many birders now carry cameras on field trips in addition to — or sometimes instead of — binoculars and spotting scopes. As bird photography increases in popularity, it’s more important than ever for photographers to consider our collective impact on the welfare of birds and to minimize disruption while pursuing our craft. Capturing a close-up view of a wild bird going about its life certainly is a thrill, but achieving that with a wary, skittish subject involves more than using a long telephoto lens. Photographic lenses don’t provide the extreme magnification of spotting scopes, and so photographers need to get physically closer to obtain a satisfactory subject size, either by approaching the bird or waiting for it to approach you. How do you do that safely and ethically? THE LOW-DOWN…

Last winter, a bright spot in my day was watching a mated pair of Carolina Wrens fly in at dusk to roost on our porch. They had discovered the rusty can I hung the summer before to hold citronella candles, and after adding a bed of dried leaf skeletons, they moved in. Each evening just before dark, the male would appear. Except on the coldest nights, he sang a few bars of his chirily-chirily-chirily song before zipping into the can, followed by his mate. It was comforting to know that something as simple as providing the pair a safe, dry place to spend the night helped them survive the brutally cold nights we can get in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia. Carolina Wrens form lifelong pair bonds and…

Corina Newsome is a graduate student at Georgia Southern University who studies the MacGillivray’s Seaside Sparrow, a bird found in coastal marshes of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. She came to my attention more than a year ago through her Twitter account, where she frequently posts about her field work with birds, her past experience as a zookeeper, and other topics. She has more than 48,000 followers, plus an additional 3,300 on Instagram. On both platforms, her handle is @hood_naturalist. Newsome wrote a chapter about birds in the book Rooted & Rising: Voices of Courage in a Time of Climate Crisis, published in 2019 by Rowman & Littlefield, and this year, her university presented her with an award for excellence in graduate research. She has also been featured by NPR,…