Innehållsförteckning för July/August 2022 från BirdWatching

BIRDING TOURS Our website has a searchable database of companies and nonprofits that offer birding tours. Many lead tours around the world while others focus on a region, nation, or other limited geographic area. Find it under the “Locations & Travel” menu. SCIENCE The oldest Roseate Spoonbill ever recorded was found within Everglades National Park in Florida Bay this spring. The bird was banded in December 2003, making it more than 18 years old in 2022. Read more in our “News & Features” section. Follow, like, and share! FACEBOOK: BirdWatchingMagazine INSTAGRAM: @birdwatchingmagazine TWITTER: @BirdWatchDaily FLICKR: BirdWatching group photo pool…

Staggering declines in bird populations are taking place around the world. So concludes a study from scientists at multiple institutions, published in May in the journal Annual Review of Environment and Resources. Loss and degradation of natural habitats and direct overexploitation of many species are cited as the key threats to avian biodiversity. Climate change is identified as an emerging driver of bird population declines. “We are now witnessing the first signs of a new wave of extinctions of continentally distributed bird species,” says lead author Alexander Lees, senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom and also a research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Avian diversity peaks globally in the tropics, and it is there that we also find the highest number of threatened species.”…

MANY WILDLIFE DISEASES are seasonal. Bird flu spreads most virulently in winter and early spring. The botulism and salmonellosis that affect backyard birds tend to strike at winter’s end, spreading as snow melts until lush vegetation covers the wasted seed and animal droppings that collected on the soil in winter. Mosquitoes transmit West Nile virus, which peaks in temperate climates from July to October. West Nile virus was unknown in the Americas until 1999. Some North American birds are far more vulnerable to the virus than humans are; of those bitten by an infected mosquito, only 1 percent of people get sick at all, while close to 100 percent of American Crows die even with expert veterinary care. Crows are large and conspicuous, so tracking dead ones became the best…

Time was ticking. Rising from bed on an early June day, I felt unsettled. Somewhere on Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, Montana, a pair of Belted Kingfishers tended their chicks snugged deep within an earthen burrow. In May, I’d witnessed dawn flights coming and going from a mysterious location downstream from an arcing vertical bank peppered with nest holes. I suspected the parents were taking turns incubating eggs. Clearly, they had snubbed the equivalent of a kingfisher mansion that offered plenty of tennis-ball-sized holes for remodeling and fresh soil for new excavations. Why hadn’t I found the active nest? It was time for a new tactic. Vowing to employ all the tricks of a naturalist, I arrived at the trailhead and did not hike, run, or walk along an established path.…

Great Egret, adult April in Galveston County, Texas SOME REFERENCE BOOKS claim that the most widespread member of the heron family is the Black-crowned Night-Heron. Actually, that distinction properly belongs to the Great Egret, which has an extensive breeding range on every continent except Antarctica. In the late 1800s, Great Egrets and other wading birds were seriously threatened by “plume hunters” who killed them so their feathers could be used in fashion. Citizens in the United States mobilized to save these birds, leading to the formation of the first Audubon Societies and to legislation that would protect all migratory birds. Populations of most of the species involved were able to rebound, and Great Egrets are probably as numerous as ever. In North America they are widespread in the lower 48…

Window collisions are one of the single-biggest causes of death for birds, accounting for up to 1 billion fatalities a year in the United States alone. Luckily, demand for bird-friendly glass is on the rise thanks to growing awareness of the issue and new bird-safe building policies in places like New York City. To meet this demand, American Bird Conservancy (ABC) is expanding its capacity to test bird-friendly glass designs. Last fall, North America’s second-ever bird-friendly glass testing tunnel debuted at Foreman’s Branch Bird Observatory in Chestertown, Maryland. The new tunnel, which is jointly run by Washington College and ABC, more than doubles the number of glass designs that can be tested by ABC for bird-friendliness each year. As the first testing tunnel located on a campus, the new tunnel…

WHEN WIFE LINDA and I first started dating, we, of course, asked each other the requisite questions: What’s your favorite color? Blue. Who’s your favorite singer? Joni Mitchell. What’s your favorite season? Winter. “Not summer?” she asked, not quite believing me. “I hate summer,” I replied. “The heat, the humidity, the mosquitoes…” But that was then, before moving to shorebird-rich South Jersey. Growing up in North Jersey, I discovered that the summer heat bakes the song out of the syrinx of woodland birds by mid-June, and walks through toasted summer woodlands are made all the more oppressive by that silence. Oh, sure, every once in a while, an American Crow sounds off or a squadron of Blue Jays make the air ring with brayed insults levied at whatever happens to…

I have long been puzzled over why we can’t get more funding for bird conservation out of public agencies in the United States. Over 45 million Americans watch birds, and 22% of all native bird species need conservation attention. Yet federal natural resource agencies and state wildlife agencies are always scrounging for real funding. I know. I worked in that arena for over 35 years. After I retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), I went back to school to take a closer look at this problem. For my Ph.D. research at Boise State University, I conducted a national survey of birders to discover what they know, where they get information, who influences their decision making, and what conservation actions they take. My goal was to find out…

IF YOU HAVEN’T paid attention to new camera products for a while, now is the time. In the last 12 to 18 months, digital mirrorless photography has come into its own. It’s undeniable that for the first time ever, DSLR cameras have finally passed the pro-gear baton to a new fleet of mirrorless flagships. The arrival of the trend-shattering Sony a1 about a year ago raised the standards bar to new heights. By the end of 2021, both Canon and Nikon joined the fray with their own top-tier full-frame mirrorless entries. In the more compact Micro Four-Thirds market, Panasonic and Olympus (newly rebranded as OM System) stepped up with impressive offerings of their own. All of this is welcome news for bird photographers at all skill levels. Flagship models, by…

Texas-based bird photographer Alan Murphy shot this photo in March 2022 during a photography workshop he was leading on Laguna Seca Ranch in south Texas. In the image, a Black Vulture preens a first-year Crested Caracara. The preening (known as allopreening since it occurs between two animals) lasted for about five minutes. Immature Crested Caracaras will allow Black Vultures but not Turkey Vultures to preen them. In turn, caracaras will preen Black Vultures. The behavior begins when the recipient approaches another bird and places the back of its neck below the bird’s bill. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Birds of the World website explains: “Giver preens recipient around head and neck, crest, face, and breast feathers for periods averaging 16-20 seconds and then preening is reciprocated. Recipient remains still with…

The shores of Delaware Bay have long been considered the No. 1 prime stopover real estate for the migratory Red Knot, specifically the rufa subspecies (Calidris canutus rufa) that winters from the Gulf of Mexico to the eastern coast of South America and breeds in Arctic Canada. In late March, however, a team of 10 ornithologists from South Carolina reported that two islands south of Charleston are just as important (if not more so) for the shorebird’s population. The researchers counted birds on Kiawah and Seabrook islands from mid-February through mid-May 2021 and tallied at least 17,247 knots, which amounts to about 41 percent of the total rufa population of 42,000 birds. The team published their findings in a 22-page paper and posted it to BioRxiv, a preprint website that…

In the mid-1900s, the population of the Swainson’s Hawk declined significantly, perhaps as much as 90 percent. The bird was listed in California as a threatened species after it declined to as low as 375 breeding pairs in 1979 throughout the state. Reasons for the decline included habitat loss due to urbanization, energy development, invasive species, and insecticide poisoning that killed tens of thousands of Swainson’s Hawks in their wintering areas in Argentina. Now, however, the species has rebounded. So says a paper recently published in Ornithological Applications. The hawk’s population in California, the authors report, has increased rapidly since 2005 at an average annual rate of 14 percent to over 18,000 pairs in 2018, but the causes for the increase remain unclear. The authors caution: “Despite strong evidence that…

As we exited the vehicle, the air appeared to be composed of half fog and half water with a ceiling of low gray clouds keeping it all contained. These were typical conditions for a late-May morning on St. Paul Island, the largest of the four main islands comprising the Pribilof group in Alaska. Resting near the center of the Bering Sea, the Pribilof Islands flaunt their volcanic origins with rugged lava flows, symmetrical cinder cones, and dark basaltic headlands. While we readied our gear — scopes, cameras, and extra layers — there was a sudden shift in the weather, not uncommon here, and rising gusts of cold, dry air from the north quickly dispersed the mist. With the wind at our backs, we walked a short stretch across the maritime…

I OFTEN SAY that I learn new things every time I go birding and that the opportunities for learning will never end. One of the keys to that is being an “active” observer and asking questions, and for this column, I thought it would be worthwhile to describe my approach and a recent experience. On a recent April day in Texas, I was happy to see a close flock of resting American Avocets. I took advantage of the opportunity to think of questions I could ask about American Avocet. The first thing that came to mind was: “What’s up with the few gray-headed birds (non-breeding color) among the many with orange heads (breeding color)?” I have wondered about this variation in the past, and with such close views, now I…