Innholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2016 i BirdWatching

When I was young, long before I knew a thing about birdwatching, I thought the birds I saw close to home weren’t anything special. The cardinals and robins that poked around in the yard where I grew up were attractive enough, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the macaws, birds-of-paradise, and other species I spied on wildlife programs on television. Colorful and spectacular, the exotic birds were the birds worth paying attention to, but all of them, it seemed, were also far away, sights to be seen only in zoos, or during expeditions to the world’s most distant corners. But then, not far from home, I saw my first Common Yellowthroat, with its brilliant yellow undersides, and, shortly after that, my first male Scarlet Tanager, so bright that it…

ONE INCH AT A TIME, climate change is stealing ashore in northeastern Florida. Scenarios for sea-level rise in the state run from 0.7 meters to 2.0 meters by 2100. In decades, according to current projections, the coastline from St. Augustine to Palm Coast, a fast-growing region under intense development pressure, will be underwater. The ecologically rich Matanzas River Basin, the 120,000-acre watershed for the Matanzas River, sits smack in the middle of that stretch. A team of urban planners and landscape architects recently evaluated how future sea-level rise and development might affect the many animals that rely on the estuary. Almost 600 plant species, more than 300 fish species, and 358 bird species have been documented there. One of them is the Painted Bunting. Writing in the journal Landscape and…

Attracting birds to a backyard involves more than feeders and a bath. Quality habitat is also critical, for the same reason that we humans would never move into a parking lot around a restaurant. We all need more than food. Good habitat provides critical selections of natural food and cover for roosting and nesting. But even the finest backyard habitat isn’t enough: We must also eliminate death traps. As the saying goes, “Above all, do no harm.” Four major killers can doom birds in our yards: glass windows, outdoor cats, pesticides, and disease. Windows: At least a billion birds are killed each year by collisions with windows in the United States. Some of the victims are feeder birds, but many are not. Bustling feeders may attract migrants that linger because…

She was a small-town librarian and not yet a birder. “Have a moment to step outside and change your life?” I asked. She did. For years, I’ve tried to excite people about birds by showing them birds. Recently, I’ve used a much easier and equally gratifying method. I’ve learned that the easiest way into a person’s heart is through the ears. Locating birds visually is challenging and frustrating. As you know, birds fly and hide. Hearing them is as easy as stepping outside and inviting the world’s newest birders simply to listen. My technique is to stand in one spot, point in the direction of a loud call or song, and say, “Hear that?” Of course, they don’t, or more correctly, their ears pick up the sound, but their brain…

Lost Among the Birds: Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year, by Neil Hayward, Bloomsbury, 2016, hardcover, 416 pages, $28. Neil Hayward didn’t start 2013 trying to do a Big Year. Or if he did, he didn’t know it. He’d recently walked away from a prominent career in biotech for reasons unclear, even to himself. He’d wrecked a long-term relationship with a woman he cared about and found himself in another relationship he was pretty sure would end badly. What he did know was that the only thing he could focus on, the thing that freed him from his personal mire, was chasing rare birds, adding species to his life and year lists, moving toward something he didn’t quite see or understand. Hayward isn’t good with small talk: “I’m…

As a longtime hiker and birdwatcher, I know from experience how challenging it can be to spot screech-owls. Small, nocturnal, and elusive, they are occasionally heard but seldom seen. Until I built my first nest box, a lifetime of birding had accounted for a mere three sightings. I vividly recall my first experience, at the conclusion of a lengthy hike. The owl was perched on the branch of a mighty oak, silhouetted against an orange sky in the fleeting moments just before sunset. On the other occasions, belligerent Blue Jays, in the light of day, led me to screech-owls that had the audacity to look out of the tree cavities they called home. Well, that all changed in a dramatic way after I built a nest box. Now it’s a…

Birdwatching is full of wonder and delight, learning and peace and camaraderie, beauty, excitement, and just plain fun. But it’s also full of surprise, and there are almost as many different kinds of surprise as there are confusing fall warblers. There’s amused surprise. At Sandy Point, on the southern tip of Plum Island, Massachusetts, I watched a Herring Gull land near a family with two small children. While the adults set up lawn chairs next to two big canvas bags, the bird strutted back and forth, waiting. Finally, the humans headed down to the waves. The gull immediately dashed to their spot, poked its head into one of the bags, and started tossing things out onto the sand. A straw hat. A magazine. A child’s sweatshirt. Two disposable diapers. A…

As a rule, birds undergo a complete molt after the breeding season. Prior to the next breeding season, many birds undergo a partial molt (typically, head and body feathers) that dresses them for courtship. Male Indigo Buntings, Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, and American Goldfinches are examples. Some birds, however, acquire their breeding plumages without replacing a single feather. European Starling is one. They are dark with light speckles in the fall and winter, and black with iridescent purple and green in the spring and summer. When do they molt their speckled garb for iridescent black? Well, they don’t. Rather than acquire their breeding plumage by molting, starlings gain it by losing the speckles from their winter plumage. The speckles are actually the cream-colored tips of the head and body feathers, and they…

BONUS ARTICLE BirdWatching UPDATE: the Bald Eagles of Staten Island Joe Trezza, author of our October 2016 cover story about the first Bald Eagles to nest in New York City in a century, sent this update: Nature works on its own time. That’s part of the beauty of it and part of the reason publishing it can present so many challenges. Nature doesn’t wait for anyone, and it doesn’t rush either. It’s with this as a backdrop that we can report some excellent news regarding Staten Island’s Bald Eagles, which grace the cover of the October 2016 issue of BirdWatching. I’ll admit, my story’s of Vito and Linda ended in a bit of ambiguity: “Now residents of our country’s largest, most spectacular city have a front-row seat as our country’s…