Just wanted to pass along a Huffington Post story and the website for Lights Out DC, a group in this city that helps catalog the birds that collide with buildings. The number of birds that die each year in building collisions is estimate between 100 million and 1 billion (!!!!!), and so what these guys are doing is incredibly important.
Pass it on.
Listen, everyone, this is big news. Noonday, Texas resident and frequent The Learning Channel viewer David Gabbard has found a pair of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in his neighborhood. ARE YOU LISTENING?
In case you were skeptical of this sighting, we've got video to prove it. News station KYTX - a station billing itself as a "news leader" and would never run a story without fact-checking so don't even worry about it - has made a visit and taken conclusive video. Here's the story.
As a birder, I am flabbergasted. How did we miss this pair? Maybe because it's been so long since Ivory-billed have been seen - 5 whole years according to the totally accurate, not at all embarassing KYTX story - that maybe we all forgot that they look exactly like Red-headed Woodpeckers? Who can say for sure, but I'll be glued to KYTX to find out.
This "Birds At Large" series exists because I enjoy the confusion that exists at the intersection of the birding and non-birding worlds. I like seeing how they view us. And how is that? Apparently, it's as people who look through binoculars while birds sit on our heads.
These are among the first page or two of images for a Google search of "Birdwatcher" and "Birdwatching."
I've been interested recently in the subject of "exotic" birds and the difficulty birders have in determining their status as wild or escapees. I've spoken to several breeders of exotic birds about their practices and how frequently birds escape, but now I wanted to talk to someone on a records committee.
Records committees are the ones who have to make the "official" decision on whether or not an exotic bird seen in the field got there on its own or with some kind of human assistance. I have never sat on a records committee, and I wanted to know how such a body reviews birds like Smew or Greenfinches or Bar-headed Geese - birds that could theoretically be migrants.
It interests me because all it takes it one. Nine hundred and ninety-nine Bar-headed Geese seen in North America could be escapees, but that last one just could have been blown astray during a high-altitude migration over Asia. Would we know? Does anyone care to check?
After this brief chat with Phil Davis, a long-time members of the Maryland/DC Birds Records Committee, I feel confident that the answer is Yes. I have known a few members of records committees over the years, and I haven't met a single one who doesn't take their job very seriously. Phil continues that tradition, and his answers reveal the inherent difficulties in dealing with these types of records, as well as the common-sense approaches the MD/DCRC uses in an attempt to find an answer. Although it still may be impossible to completely determine the origin on a bird seen in the field, there are birders out there doing their best to figure it out.
I am aware that the practice of using bird skins to decorate hats was once a serious problem. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, thousands upon thousands of birds were used, in some part, to make ladies look dandy. Great and Snowy Egrets nearly went extinct, and many other species were hunted, including: albatross, rails, gulls, owls, orioles, sparrows ... nothing with feathers seemed to be exempt.
I had never given a whole lot of thought to those hats, and had never actually seen one. I generally leave fashion to the fashionistas, and I just assumed that these people could at least balance the death of thousands of mind-their-own-businessing birds against some pretty nice-looking hats. That is until I actually some one of these things, at a bed-and-breakfast I stayed at last week:
It's been unseasonably warm in the Washington, DC area this March, and lots of birders have been taking advantage of the warmth to seek out early migrants. The birds have been cooperating, with species like Wood Thrush, Louisiana Waterthrush and Yellow-throated Warbler all making earlier-than-usual appearances.
Thinking on the way to work yesterday morning about these early migrants I was struck by a question I couldn't answer: How do birds wintering in South America know that we're having a warm March? It would seem that early springs in the north shouldn't affect migrant arrival dates, unless the northern temperatures are mirrored by warmer-than-average temperatures in the migrants' wintering or staging areas.
Coincidentally (I swear!), this exact question was posed on the MDOsprey listserv today, sparking an interesting discussion. I won't rehash the whole line, but I was interested in a response by a Baltimore birder named Richard Edden: Maybe the warm weather is inspiring more birders than usual to be out in mid-March and they're seeing birds that would otherwise be missed?
I love the simplicity of this answer. I've written before about how rare birds are more likely to be found in areas that are more heavily birded (sounds obvious when I type it out like that), and I think this is a variation of that theme: better weather = more birders out early = more birds found.
Of course, there's the business of figuring out if it's true. Have there been more birders out in MD/DC this March than previous, colder Marches?
Well, The Weather Channel reports that March 6 through 22nd have all been 60 degrees or above all but two days (70 or above 8 of those days), with little to no rain. Nice. In contrast, March 2011 in the DC areas was wetter and colder. Only 5 days broke 60 degrees, and it rained (or snowed) on 9 days. Of the remaining days in the month (22nd - 31st), it rained or snowed five times and never broke 50. A crappier month to go birding, undoubtedly.
Were there correspondingly less reports to the MDOsprey listserv in March 2011 than there have been in March 2012? Yeah, there were. In the second week of March 2011, there were 99 messages sent to the list. In the second week of March 2012 there were 135. Third week of March 2011 there were 110 messages, in the third week of March 2012 there were 140.
Looking at this limited data I'm pretty hesitant to draw any conclusions about birder-effort in early spring, but I think it's certainly a factor. There is no doubt that some birds are just back early. Yellow-throated Warbler was reported in MD on March 16 in 2012, but not until the first days of April in the previous two years. On the other hand, Louisiana Waterthrush was just three days earlier (March 18) than it was first seen the previous two years.
There is no question that birds won't be reported if there's no one out to find them. While there are a lot of factors involved with the timing of when birds arrive, short-term trends and early dates should be checked against birding effort in the areas of arrival.