Laura's Birding Blog

Natural born killer

2009-06-28T09:17:00.003-05:00

Cat
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

This beautiful cat is a natural born killer, but as a domesticated animal it is decidedly NOT a natural predator. What natural predator would kill two shrews just for fun, leaving the carcasses when the tiny mammals stopped "playing" along?

This morning when I was walking Photon we came upon the first dead shrew and I wondered what had killed it. Shrews apparently taste horrible, and normal predators, after tasting one, stop wasting time with them. The question was answered when we came upon this cat with the second shrew in its mouth. When it saw Photon, it dropped the shrew and skulked into the woods, too late for the little mammal. I could tell exactly where the cat was in the understory by following the sounds of the many anxious parent birds giving alarm calls.

There are so many nestlings and flightless fledglings right now--I get a stomachache every time I see a cat slinking about outdoors. Someone recently asked me whether their cat was in danger from Barn Owls that were calling and seeming to "scold" the cat every night. I feel so angry when people pretend their cat is a natural predator but don't want to subject it to the same harsh realities that genuinely natural predators face. And in the case of the Barn Owls--they're hardly big enough to mess with most cats. That group was clearly a family with probably more than one owlet. Their chicks were far more at danger from the cat than the cat was from the owls.

I love cats. But they belong indoors. Period.

Grandpa

2009-06-21T12:09:00.002-05:00

Common Redpoll
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

My grandpa died 39 years ago, on Father's Day, 1970. He was one of the formative people in my life who get credit for whatever good I may do, and there are still times when I ache with longing for him. This is hardly the first time I've linked to this story, but since it's Father's Day, I'm reposting it, the one tribute I've written about him, "Grandpa's Canaries."

Great Blue Heron and fish

2009-06-17T05:01:00.001-05:00

Great Blue Heron and fish
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

I have been having a LOT of fun with Annie, my new camera. We took this photo at lunch yesterday at the lab. Amazing to realize that this poor little fish is right now nourishing not just one heron but three or four others. That's how many babies are in the nest. Three for sure, and maybe four! I'll be trying to get more photos from the nest tomorrow.

"MY" baby!

2009-06-11T07:48:00.001-05:00

Great Blue Heron and chick
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

The Great Blue Herons nesting in Sapsucker Woods this year have been so wonderful to watch that the window in the staff lounge has become something of a Laura magnet. We could tell that at least one egg hatched Friday or over the weekend, because we could watch the adult regurgitating food, and today I finally got a glimpse of a chick!

Fawn

2009-06-04T07:50:00.001-05:00

Fawn
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

Today's For the BIrds program:

Fawn
I was home in Duluth for a few days last month, on either end of spending a week in Eagle River, Wisconsin. It coincided with the time of year when fawns are born, and as we were packing my stuff, I told Russ that more than any other thing, I was hoping to get a chance to see and photograph a newborn fawn that week. Minutes later while we loaded the car, my neighbor walked by and said there was a fawn in her backyard. We zipped over there and voila! I’ve posted a few photos of it on my flickr page, and one is up on my Twin Beaks blog.

There is something exquisitely innocent and sweet about a tiny fawn. If I hadn’t needed to get on the road, I’d have spent hours there, mesmerized by the tiny thing curled up in the lawn. As long as you keep a respectful distance, fawns are fearless. Their mother told them to stay put, so they do, trusting in cryptic coloration and a benevolent universe. And at this point, the universe is indeed benevolent for them. A great many are killed every year during hunting season, and too many are killed on highways, but the fact that their numbers remain so very high is testament to how easy their lives actually are right now. Two and a half decades ago I found my own babies even more mesmerizing than this fawn. I stared at them for hours, days, weeks, months, taking endless photos and marveling that such innocence and sweetness could exist on this planet.

Babies and fawns are alike in the way that the sight of them elicits a surge of protectiveness in most of us. We nurture both till they’re on their own, and then we complain, with as much justification as we had when we were nurturing them, that there are too many of their kind on the planet. That fawn is fed on milk that was formed within the doe’s body, fueled by native plants that become increasingly scarce as the invasive exotic weeds that deer shun grow ever more pervasive. My babies were fed on milk produced from the food I ate—vegetables grown on endless acres of farm fields that choked habitat and oozed with pesticides and fertilizers that worked their way into water supplies and up the food chain to contaminate food supplies. At the time the conservative Nixon administration banned DDT in the United States, the pesticide was not just wiping out Bald Eagles and Peregrine Falcons—it was contaminating mother’s milk.

Looking at the tiny fawn curled up on the lawn, waiting patiently for its mother’s warmth and nourishment, trusting implicitly in this benevolent universe, I realized that too much of a good thing is still a good thing. But it isn’t enough to feel protectiveness and warmth toward a fawn or baby—we must act on it. These helpless beings trust in adults to keep the universe benevolent—overflowing with biodiversity, clean water and air, birdsong, peaceful relationships with our neighbors, to sustain them throughout that life so filled with promise. We can’t think this through as if we ourselves were still children—we must remember the harsh realities of predation, disease, and death. Love without commitment isn’t mature love, and those of us moved to protect babies of all kinds must be mature and thoughtful—to learn what exactly are the problems these tiny beings will face, and to use our minds and hearts and labor to solve them in as humane and gentle but committed a way as is humanly possible, to make this world we share truly sustainable for all the babies among us, and for their children and their children’s children. We’re not all of us rocket scientists. But we are supposed to be the smartest species on the planet—it’s up to us to justify that trust we see in the eyes of babies and fawns.

Links

2009-06-03T20:29:00.005-05:00

Last week I promised my Elderhostel class I'd put together a list of links for good websites. Here they are!

*My "sets" of photos--I put the Elderhostel ones first, and then the rest organized by family. I still need to categorize all the Elderhostel ones, but at least you can see them together.

*
Troy's flickr photos

*Troy's Elderhostel photos from this year.

*The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds website. Type in just about any North American bird in the search box and you'll find a lot--sounds and photos both!

*My goofy "Twin Beaks" blog.

I can't remember what other links I promised. If you think of anything else I should have here, add a comment or email me and I'll edit this post to add it.

Death of an Ovenbird

2009-05-14T06:38:00.003-05:00

Ovenbird
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

On May 13, I took Photon for a very short walk at 6:10 in the morning. We headed back to our apartment at 6:15, and there on the doorstep of my apartment building was a dead Ovenbird, still warm. It had apparently come down to earth after flying hundreds of miles overnight, was skulking about in the shrubs around the building, and the porch light or hall light bewildered it and it crashed into the glass door. I live in a large apartment complex. My apartment happens to be the one next to the office, which is why there’s an outside glass door at all—none of the entries to the other buildings, and neither of the other two entries to apartments in this building—are enclosed at all. I’d been thinking how lucky I am to be in one of the handful of apartments in the entire complex that has an enclosed entry—I don’t have to go outside, even momentarily, to get my mail or go down to the basement laundry. But that poor Ovenbird paid a heavy price for such a minor convenience.

When I was in Guatemala two years ago, I spent quite a bit of time with an Ovenbird. He or she had a winter territory near the conference center I was visiting. Whenever I could break away for a few minutes, there the bird would be. It was fun watching it go about its business, not focused on nesting or feeding young but on just living day to day. That bird had flown thousands of miles to get there—perhaps it, too, had come all the way from Minnesota, but it didn’t arrive in the comfort of an airplane but after millions of wingbeats, flying entirely on its own power. While I was there, the weather was beautiful, but there were other dangers for a little Ovenbird—snakes and large lizards that could snap it up in a single bite, army ants that could envelope it as it slept, and a host of other predators. And in the tropics, Ovenbirds are still vulnerable to windows—while I was there, an Ovenbird was found dead beneath a window.

For some mysterious reason, Ovenbirds are killed at windows and glass doors in disproportionate numbers—dozens of people over the years have told me that although they hear Ovenbirds on every summer walk through the woods, the only Ovenbirds they’ve ever seen were found dead under their windows. As I held this poor dead Ovenbird, still shrinking as the last vestiges of breath passed out of its air sacs, I could feel the tragedy of a bird, a fellow traveler on this planet coming so far, working so hard, to come to such a meaningless end so near to its destination. The irony and sadness cast a pallor on the rest of the day.

Gary Larson once drew a Far Side cartoon with the caption, “When birds hit the window of vulnerability.” He drew a huge brick building with just one tiny window and a bird hitting it with a big “Bonk!” He didn’t draw it carefully enough to be identifiable, but my guess is that bird would have had to be an Ovenbird.

The fact that I could be ironically detached enough from the tragedy of this Ovenbird death to think of a Far Side cartoon bespeaks just how removed from the individual lives of other species we can be. But John Donne’s masterful meditation on the connectedness between us humans is perhaps not as all-encompassing as it should be. No man is an island, entire of itself. And mankind is not an island either, entire of itself. Any being’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in the planet’s life; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

(Today's radio program transcript. You can here the program on my podcast page--click on the title and wait patiently till it loads.

Stop! Thief!

2009-04-21T06:02:00.003-05:00

This sucks--I just noticed that someone ripped off great swaths of text from my Owls of Harry Potter for her own blog! I'm so tired of people stealing my best lines and stuff, but this is ridiculous, and it sounds like she has a commercial site, not just a personal one. I don't have a myspace page so I can't even email her. But she took the information from my Owls of Harry Potter page, and it looks like she may have also taken things from Karla Kinstler's pages.

Some amusingly grotesque...

2009-04-06T11:20:00.002-05:00

Archimedes
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

...photos of Archimedes downing a mouse are posted today on Twin Beaks.

Not about birds, but too funny to resist

2009-04-04T09:20:00.001-05:00

Today Is International Talk Like William Shatner Day!

2009-03-22T09:00:00.001-05:00

Photon in a prairie-chicken blind

2009-03-21T12:40:00.002-05:00

Photon
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

Most dogs wouldn't last 5 minutes in a prairie-chicken blind before they barked, whined, or otherwise became nuisances. But this little dog waited patiently the whole time I was there--and I lingered an hour longer than was required! But she's not a morning dog, as you can see. I came across this photo when I was posting my Greater Prairie-Chicken photos to my Flickr photostream last night.

101 Ways to Help Birds

2009-03-21T11:34:00.004-05:00

This is rather shameless self-promoting, but I sure wish that, with the new State of the Birds report, people would take another look at 101 Ways to Help Birds. I cover removing unnecessary fencing (the #1 cause of mortality for female prairie-chickens!!) energy conservation and how all the methods of producing electricity cause serious harms to habitat, air and water quality, etc. [well, except solar]), suggestions for making windows safer for birds, what to do when you find a bird in trouble, the best ways to solve problems with birds, etc. I was covering a lot of these topics before others seemed to even notice them--there's a part about birds and airplanes, for example, and I was researching bird impacts with windows for years before the book came out in 2006. Anyway, it really is worth a read, whether you buy it, check it out from a library, stand in the aisle or sit in a chair and read it at your favorite bookstore, or read it piece by piece in Google Books. I put my heart and soul into it, and years of research and writing, and it would be lovely if it were selling better.

Editors at two very prestigious publishing houses wanted to publish it, but in both cases the marketing departments nixed the project saying no one wants to buy books about conservation. I'd love to prove the marketing departments wrong, but so far apparently they were right.

I made Anderson Cooper's blog on CNN!

2009-03-20T20:42:00.001-05:00

It's about chickadee brains and neuron regeneration. Check it out!

Check out Twin Beaks

2009-03-20T11:06:00.002-05:00

Much as I love blogging, more and more I find myself thinking of how to post information as a bird might do, so I'm putting more and more information on Twin Beaks and less and less here. Some of it's funny (or not--humor is always subjective), but a lot of it is important conservation information. I'm trying very hard to make that website accessible and fun for birders of all levels, but always with a strong conservation message.

State of the Birds

2009-03-19T14:13:00.001-05:00

I am SO proud to work at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The teamwork that went into this report was truly inspiring, and I'm very proud of the Lab's part in it. This report, and the video, are splendid. Please check it out.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today released the first ever comprehensive report on bird populations in the United States, showing that nearly a third of the nation’s 800 bird species are endangered, threatened or in significant decline due to habitat loss, invasive species, and other threats.

At the same time, the report highlights examples, including many species of waterfowl, where habitat restoration and conservation have reversed previous declines, offering hope that it is not too late to take action to save declining populations.

“Just as they were when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring nearly 50 years ago, birds today are a bellwether of the health of land, water and ecosystems,” Salazar said. “From shorebirds in New England to warblers in Michigan to songbirds in Hawaii, we are seeing disturbing downward population trends that should set off environmental alarm bells. We must work together now to ensure we never hear the deafening silence in our forests, fields and backyards that Rachel Carson warned us about.”

The report, The U.S. State of the Birds, synthesizes data from three long-running bird censuses conducted by thousands of citizen scientists and professional biologists.

In particular, it calls attention to the crisis in Hawaii, where more birds are in danger of extinction than anywhere else in the United States. In addition, the report indicates a 40 percent decline in grassland birds over the past 40 years, a 30 percent decline in birds of aridlands, and high concern for many coastal shorebirds. Furthermore, 39 percent of species dependent on U.S. oceans have declined.

However, the report also reveals convincing evidence that birds can respond quickly and positively to conservation action. The data show dramatic increases in many wetland birds such as pelicans, herons, egrets, osprey, and ducks, a testament to numerous cooperative conservation partnerships that have resulted in protection, enhancement and management of more than 30 million wetland acres.

“These results emphasize that investment in wetlands conservation has paid huge dividends,” said Kenneth Rosenberg, director of Conservation Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Now we need to invest similarly in other neglected habitats where birds are undergoing the steepest declines.”

“Habitats such as those in Hawaii are on the verge of losing entire suites of unique bird species,” said Dr. David Pashley, American Bird Conservancy’s Vice President for Conservation Programs. “In addition to habitat loss, birds also face many other man-made threats such as pesticides, predation by cats, and collisions with windows, towers and buildings. By solving these challenges we can preserve a growing economic engine – the popular pastime of birdwatching that involves millions of Americans – and improve our quality of life.”

“While some bird species are holding their own, many once common species are declining sharply in population. Habitat availability and quality is the key to hea

Surveys conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Geological Survey, including the annual Breeding Bird Survey, combined with data gathered through volunteer citizen science program such as the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count, show once abundant birds such as the northern bobwhite and marbled murrelet are declining significantly. The possibility of extinction also remains a cold reality for many endangered birds.

“Citizen science plays a critical role in monitoring and understanding the threats to these birds and their habitats, and only citizen involvement can help address them,” said National Audubon Society’s Bird Conservation Director, Greg Butcher. “Conservation action can only make a real difference when concerned people support the kind of vital habitat restoration and protection measures this report explores.”

Birds are beautiful, as well as economically important and a priceless part of America's natural heritage. Birds are also highly sensitive to environmental pollution and climate change, maki

The United States is home to a tremendous diversity of native birds, with more than 800 species inhabiting terrestrial, coastal, and ocean habitats, including Hawaii. Among these species, 67 are Federally-listed as endangered or threatened. In addition, more than 184 species are designated as species of conservation concern due to a small distribution, high-level of threats, or declining populations.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service coordinated creation of the new report as part of the U.S. North American Bird Conservation Initiative, which includes partners from American Bird Conservancy, the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Klamath Bird Observatory, National Audubon Society, The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Geological Survey.

Read all about it, and even download a cool PDF of the whole report, at www.stateofthebirds.org.

Going nuts with my podcast

2009-03-15T08:50:00.002-05:00

I know that Macs are supposed to be so wonderful, but they're so tied to their own software, and the whole system is so inflexible that it's driving me nuts. I like a lot of features about iWeb, and that's how I'd been putting my podcasts on iTunes, but when I tried to migrate my homepage over, too, since I'm now paying TWO hosts every year and really need to start saving money, iWeb erased my whole podcast. So now I'm starting from scratch--only somehow iTunes erased the description of the podcast now, and I don't know how to change it back. Oh, well. I guess I'll have to stick with my old host for another year.

Head to Twin Beaks for CSI: Ithaca!

2009-03-11T04:26:00.002-05:00

Magnificent Frigatebird
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

I've been way too busy and distracted to post much here lately, but have been keeping up with Twin Beaks. If you're not already doing it, you should check "my" Twin Beaks blog--"the first blog by birds, for birds." This past weekend I got brave enough or cocky enough to add it to Fat Birder's Birding Top 500 list. It started out with a ranking over 1000, but quickly raced up the chart and is, as of this moment, up to the #213 spot.

Ryan Bakelaar just allowed me to post his posting to the Cayuga Birds listserv about the necropsy he did on the Magnificent Frigatebird that turned up in Ithaca after Hurricane Ike--it's a wee bit gruesome, especially after he sent some pretty cool but explicit parasite photos (that Gil Grissom would LOVE), but very interesting. On Twin Beaks, of course, where everything is told from the birds' point of view, this is presented as the first episode of CSI: Ithaca. Check it out!

Neotropical Birds Online

2009-03-04T11:57:00.002-06:00

Pale-billed Woodpecker female
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

Tom Schulenberg, one of the authors of Birds of Peru, writes:

We are a long way from having a comprehensive series of natural history accounts for Neotropical birds.

But, we can change that. Working together, we might get there a whole lot faster than you might think.

The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology is pleased to announce the launch of Neotropical Birds Online (http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/portal/home). Neotropical Birds Online is similar to the familiar Birds of North America series, but one important difference is that Neotropical Birds will be free - no subscription fees!

The scope of Neotropical Birds Online is all bird species that regularly occur in the Neotropics, from Mexico and the Caribbean south to southernmost South America. The emphasis is on species that breed within this region, but the eventual goal is to provide accounts for all species that regularly occur within this region.

Each account on Neotropical Birds Online is a separate online publication. Full credit is given to the author, or collaborating team of authors, for each species account. The online format allows authors to revise their accounts to keep pace with new research. This format also allows us to incorporate other media into the species accounts, and to link to related resources elsewhere on the web. This is a collaborative project: Neotropical Birds Online not only is for researchers, birders, and managers who are interested in birds of the neotropics, but it also will be *created* by that community of specialists.

We are launching this with only a few completed species accounts, although more will be going online very soon. But for this project to succeed, it will need support from researchers working in the neotropics. You can contribute to Neotropical Birds Online not only through authoring a species account, but also by providing photographic images, sound or video tape recordings; learn more about how to contribute http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/portal/1057.

Charred remains

2009-01-25T05:45:00.003-06:00

It's interesting for me to keep track of the investigation of the US Airways plane that crashed into the Hudson, because after an Air National Guard F-16 crashed on takeoff in Duluth on September 18, 1992, I was the first person to identify the charred remains of two or three American Golden-Plovers that had been sucked into the single engine. In that case, a flock of birds had been on the runway on a splendid migration day. F-16s go so fast that the pilot, David Johnson, didn't know what happened--he got up in the air and the engine instantly quit. He was quick-thinking, and pointed the plane away from houses before ejecting and parachuting to safety.

A few days later, two uniformed Air National Guard crash investigators showed up at my house with the remains of the birds in plastic bags, thinking I could identify them! They'd already stumped the people up at Hawk Ridge. Fortunately, since I had rehabbed so many birds, I had a pretty good feel for feathers. These were dull brown with no wingbars--although charring could mask colors, wingbars would have been at least a bit evident--and of the smooth and waxy texture characteristic of waterbirds. (That filled me with relief--when I heard about the crash, I was scared that the plane had collided with a hawk, since the day of the crash was also the day of our biggest raptor migration that year.) The remains were significantly smaller than duck wings, and so I methodically perused the field guide and saw that the only two shorebird possibilities were Solitary Sandpiper and what was then called the Lesser Golden-Plover, and that the length of the feathers was more consistent with the plover.

A couple of hours later, the investigators came by again, this time with photos of a dozen or so dead but easily identifiable Lesser Golden-Plovers. The photos had been taken by investigators scrutinizing the area around the runway. The plane had crashed into the whole flock. Sad as the little bodies made me, it felt wonderful to have figured out the charred ones correctly.

Cool as it was to identify those remains, playing forensic ornithologist for a day, my word could hardly be the final one. All the bird evidence was sent to the Smithsonian's amazing Roxie Laybourne for verification. She was a wonderful woman--I got to meet her at an AOU meeting and she was as warm and friendly as she was knowledgeable.

Anyway, today's New York Times has a fascinating article about the Smithsonian team that identifies birds now that Roxie Laybourne has died:

Science

Identifying the Bird After a Strike, When Not Much Bird Is Left

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: January 25, 2009

At the National Museum of Natural History, scientists study the remains of birds that have collided with planes, looking for clues to prevent future accidents.

Birding in the Sax-Zim Bog

2009-01-23T19:25:00.002-06:00

Boreal Chickadee
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

I spent today birding with Mike Hendrickson in the bog. We saw a lot of really cool birds despite the awful wind, but thanks to that wind, no owls. But we did see this Boreal Chickadee, trying to get into the deer rib cages on Admiral Road, though a Hairy Woodpecker interfered with those plans. You can see a bunch of photos from the day at my flickr set: http://flickr.com/photos/48014585@N00/sets/72157612916573968/

Grandpa

2009-01-11T09:44:00.003-06:00

Today my grandpa would have been 113 years old. It's hard to believe he's been gone, physically, from this world for 38 years, because he's been very much of a spiritual presence my entire life. He wasn't particularly knowledgeable about birds, but did inspire me more than anyone else in my childhood to learn about birds. I wrote about that in Grandpa's Canaries. I haven't yet had a redpoll at my feeder this year, but I sure hope one turns up today.

If any of my children turn me into a grandmother one day, I hope I'm as nurturing, loving, and inspiring as my grandpa was for me.

Trees for Tomorrow Elderhostel

2009-01-10T18:57:00.003-06:00

Laura Erickson
Originally uploaded by tjwalters13

I'm so pumped! I get to do the Trees for Tomorrow Elderhostel in May with Troy Walters again! This is one we've done many times together, and we always see great birds--Boreal Chickadees and Golden-winged Warblers and Black-throated Blues and much, much more--and we and our group always have a lot of fun. It runs from May 24 to May 30--we should get peak numbers of birds and song that week! Check out the rest of Troy's photostream from the 2007 Elderhostel, which was the last time I was the instructor.

Great birding spot, or the greatest birding spot?

2009-01-10T13:33:00.001-06:00

Great birding spot, or the greatest birding spot?
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

I can't wait till Friday, January 23! I'm going to spend the day birding with my friend Mike Hendrickson. Great Gray Owls, Northern Hawk Owls, and Boreal Chickadees, here I come!!

Yay, Obama!

2009-01-06T08:54:00.002-06:00

Tufted Titmouse
Originally uploaded by Laura Erickson

The inauguration invitations are printed on paper approved by the Forest Stewardship Council! Read about it here. And when you buy new wood products or non-recycled paper, make sure it's FSC Certified.