Category Archives: Conservation

What’s Not To Love About Loons?

My dentist lives on a nearby lake (Elmore) so while I was being examined by him the other day, I asked if the ice was out yet. He replied “No, but isn’t it amazing – the first day it’s gone the loons arrive? How do they know?”

I mentioned that they perform recco flights and hang out until it’s time. I related a story of an incident last month at our local airport where a loon crashed landed on the dark runway and had to be rescued. Here’s the report by Eric Hansen, who is  the biologist for the Vermont Loon Recovery Project.

…On March 27, a Common Loon crash-landed at the Berlin Airport. Owen Montgomery, who works next door at the U.S. Department of Agriculture office, picked up the bird and found that it had few scratches.  It seemed healthy otherwise.

John Buck of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department transported the loon to Sara Eisenhower at VINS Wildlife Services for examination. The loon was healthy minus making the mistake that the Berlin Airport does not have a runway for seaplanes (airports in Alaska have canals next to their terrestrial runways). VINS released the bird on the Connecticut River.

This loon was likely already performing reconnaissance flights to return to its territory.  Males tend to return first, thus maybe this was the male from Berlin Pond. It may have been tired from the flight, possibly from the New England coast. Loons will fly hundreds of miles in a single migratory flight. It saw the black of the runway, and, like the rest of us suffering from spring fever, perhaps had notions of water, sun, and fish.

Yesterday, on a cool grey day, I did some birding up in Caledonia County and heard for the first time this year the wonderful call of a Common Loon lifting off water. It flew right over me at Hardwick Lake, which is open and where were three. Another three were at Joe’s Pond which has very little open water. Here is a low-light shot of a couple who were hanging out together. You can see the ice in the background.

Two loons hanging out together at Joe's Pond in West Danville, Vermont.

Two loons hanging out together at Joe’s Pond in West Danville, Vermont.

The loons we see in Texas are in winter plumage, essentially solid black, and are silent. The first lesson we learn in distinguishing them from Double-crested Cormorants is the way they hold their bill level while the cormorants have theirs pointed slightly upward.

There were only seven pairs of Common Loons thirty years ago in Vermont. Now there are more than 70 breeding pairs across the state. Due to the work of Vermont Center for Ecostudies, Vermont Fish & Wildlife, and hundreds of volunteers, this is a great success story to celebrate on the day after Earth Day.

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Drilling for “oil” in the nursery

A disturbing article on the effect of tar sands on birds from Canadian blogger Sharon McInnes:

Some of Enbridge’s oil tanks are decorated with illustrations of lovely Canada Geese in flight. Let’s just hope they don’t land in the tar sands tailing ponds.

Enbridge tanks

Almost all the largest oil companies are currently mining and drilling in the Boreal forest and wetlands where more than half of the birds of North America nest. According to The Boreal Forest Region: North America’s Bird Nursery the Boreal Forest is the preferred breeding ground (i.e. they do over 50% of their breeding there) of 96 Western Hemisphere bird species. And a total of 276 species breed within the area when you count species that do at least 5% of their breeding there.

Boreal Forest. Photo by Olga Oslina. Flick’r CC image.

Here’s the bad news: according to the National Resources Defence Council’s December 2008 report, Danger in the Nursery: Impact on Birds of Tar Sands Oil Development in Canada’s Boreal Forest, over the next 30 to 50 years between 6 million and 166 million more birds could be lost as a result of tar sands development, this in addition to the ever-increasing number of species already declining at alarming rates.

Athabasca_2011_jpeg_492x0_q85_crop-smart

Tar sand deposits lie under 141,000 square kilometres of boreal forest and muskeg. NASA photo 2011

Let’s be clear: tar sands are not oil. They are a mixture of approximately 10% bitumen mixed with sand, clay, silt, and water. Bitumen is “what a desperate civilization mines after it’s depleted its cheap oil.” (Tar Sands, Andrew Nikiforuk, 2010) Getting it from its raw state to a state in which it will flow through a pipeline takes a mind-boggling amount of fresh water, a complex network of roads, pipelines, well pads, compressor stations, energy generation facilities, and tailing ponds. It means the devastation of the forest covering the tar sands along with every living thing that called that forest home. Whether the tar is extracted by open-pit mining using 400-ton 3-story high trucks and electric shovels worth $15 million each, or by ‘in situ’ drilling, the result is the same: massive habitat loss and fragmentation, contaminated air and water, loss of huge volumes of water from wetlands, lakes, and rivers, and greenhouse gas emissions triple those of conventional oil drilling. Global warming is just one of the nasty results.

Read the rest of the post

Declining Grassland Birds & Pesticides

Grasshopper Sparrow Photo: Nick Saunders

Grasshopper Sparrow Photo: Nick Saunders

A new paper by Canadian scientists Pierre Mineau and Mélanie Whiteside identifies pesticide toxicity to birds as an important factor in grassland bird declines. “Pesticide Acute Toxicity is a Better Correlate of U.S. Grassland Bird Declines than Agricultural Intensification” was recently published in the peer-reviewed, open-access online journal PLOS One. The study found that acutely toxic pesticides (rather than habitat loss) were the most likely leading cause of the widespread population declines of grassland birds in the United States. “The data suggest that loss of birds in agricultural fields is more than an unfortunate consequence of pest control; it may drive bird populations to local extinction,” said Dr. Mineau in a related American Bird Conservancy media release. To read the full article ,select this link.

Bryan Pfeiffer Takes A New (old) Trail

photo credit - Bryan Pfeiffer

photo credit – Bryan Pfeiffer

Bryan Pfeiffer is a well-known Central Vermont writer, naturalist, photographer and educator.  Many of us have enjoyed his bird walks/tours, his humor-filled lectures, and his photographic skills.  His blog post the other day caught many of us by surprise — not that he’s abandoning some of his many ventures to work on a book — but that he is cutting way back on his electronic activity.  For me, tethered to a MacBook, iPad, and iPhone too much, it was a call to look at how I balance my outdoor and other activities with blogging, Tweeting, and Facebooking.  (I made that a verb to see if my English-teacher wife reads this!

Bryan outlines his decision with his usual clarity and thoughtfulness.  It’s a good read for any birder:

Fifteen years ago I left journalism for nature. I swapped a necktie for binoculars, a reporter’s notepad for a naturalist’s field book. Although my income sank to levels of voluntary poverty, I inherited wealth in a new currency: a warbler’s dawn melody, an orchid’s purple glow, a dragonfly’s ancient tenacity.

This life outside I have been eager to share with others. Coded into my DNA is a drive to bring nature and people together. It is how I’ve made my living. It has given me purpose. I suppose it’s no different than journalism. If the free trade of facts and knowledge are essential to a functioning society, then so too is the discovery and enjoyment of nature critical to its future. And to our own.

If I couldn’t get you outside, your ears tuned to a Mink Frog, your nose tingling with the scent of Balsam Poplar, your eyes wide and locked on a Regal Fritillary, your mouth savoring serviceberries, or your feet wet in a spruce bog, then here at The Daily Wing I ventured to unite your senses with wildlife and wild places. For three years this blog, with all due humility, has been my intersection of nature and journalism.

Now it will rest.

My blend of the wild and the wired will enter diapause, nature’s state of dormancy. Not only will this blog rest, but so will my fling with Facebook, Twitter, digital photography, radio television broadcasts, PowerPointing and other electronic communications. I’m dimming the lights and heading for the woods with a notebook and pencil.  (Read the whole post here.)

It’s minus 16 F this morning and still dark out so I think I’m comfortable drinking coffee and writing — but I’m giving Bryan’s diapause idea a lot of thought as we move to saner temperatures and arriving birds.

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A Birder’s Band for Vermont?

Young Duck HunterThe onset of waterfowl hunting has spawned a lively discussion on VTBirds about ways for birders to get more credit for supporting conservation efforts.  As I blogged last month, we get little respect from our contributions for Federal duck stamps and even Ducks Unlimited memberships.  My friend Scott put it like this on the list:

The thing is that the current system doesn’t provide a clear way for state and federal managers to know whether the purchaser of a duck stamp is extractive** or non-extractive oriented (or both) in his / her interests.

Consequently, when conservation issues come before legislative or administrative bodies, the voice of all those who might have non-extractive ideas / wishes are very difficult to measure, whereas the licenses and stamps are widely quoted as the constituency interested in extractive issues.

This is not to say that extractive and non-extractive conservationists don’t have many opinions in common.  Nor to suggest that there are not many of us who support both extractive and non-extractive organizations and activities.  There are.

It is just that there is a huge body of non-extractive recreationalists, citizen scientists, hikers, birders, feeder-watchers, lepidopterists, dragonfly lovers, park visitors, etc. who really don’t currently have a place at the table.

A non-extractive conservation support button, stamp, tag, etc. would give that audience a way to have its presence quantified and votes counted.  To me, that has great value.

**  Scott explains: To me, these seem like a nice terms to delineate between environmental management practices that are purposed to provide harvestable populations vs. those that are designed to maximize diversity / conserve ecosystems.  The words Hunters and Birders tend to polarize and divide.  People may be both, and have both objectives in mind in certain circumstances.

One of the interesting references in the discussion is the program in Maine to sell bands for binoculars to support bird conservation.  They describe like this:

Maine’s hunters and anglers through license fees and equipment taxes have paid for the bulk of these efforts. With declining funds available for non-game and endangered species work, our bird conservation efforts now also depend on Maine’s birding community to help conserve what you care about.  For years bird bands have helped biologists understand migratory bird population trends and habitat needs. Now the Maine Birder Band is available as a tool for wildlife watchers of all stripes to support the non-game and endangered species conservation efforts of your Wildlife Department.

The Maine Birder Band can be proudly worn on your binocular strap to show your support for bird conservation. The number on each band will be registered to the buyer, and bands include a phone number where lost and recovered optics can be reported allowing us to notify the registered owner.

So, there has been some constructive posts on this subject on the list serve and it is obvious that many Vermont (and elsewhere) birders are willing to put their money where their mouth is.  We’ll see where this goes but it’s good to get a positive discussion going.

hunter photo by thefixer       birder band photo  Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife

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Won’t Get Fooled Again

I’m heading to Massachusetts next week and plan to do some birding and the Who song, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” comes to mind.  Here’s the way I described it a couple of years ago:
“Camera ready, I walked through the sand dunes at Salisbury Beach State Reservation to the Ipswich River, hoping not to spook any waterfowl.  My dog, Penny, was just ahead, nosing through the beach grass.  At once, I spotted a flock of water birds up in a cove — they looked like scoters through the binoculars.  I took a couple of quick shots and veered away, not wanting the dog to hassle them.  Little did I know that they were tethered decoys!
 
No wonder those birds didn’t spook, they are decoys

I walked down the beach and the Vizsla got involved with a Common Eider, and as I was getting her out of the water and starting back to the truck, this tall guy with binoculars strode up and asked, “Have you caught any scoters yet?”  Huh?  I guess my blank look gave him the answer so he continued, “Oh, I guess you’re not part of the team.”

Now my curiosity was piqued and I peppered him with questions.  I’d seen a number of boat with guys wearing camo and I thought they were hunters — but didn’t see any shotguns.  They were nosing into the group of scoters, and I had really wondered what was going on.

Black scoters, White-winged scoters, Surf Scoters, and a Common Eider rest on the Merrimac River

My visitor had just arrived from British Columbia — he was a wildlife biologist brought in to help.  He explained that it was a project by the Gorham, Maine BioDiversity Research Institute and the team was trying to capture a dozen female white-winged scoters.  They had mist nets set up and were also trying to snag scoters from the boats.  His job was to determine the age of the scoter.  They had a vet on the team to implant a satellite transmitter in the bird’s cavity.

We talked a bit about the importance of tracking individual birds to see better how migration patterns work – I noted a recent report I’d seen on perigrine falcons and how interesting it was.

It was cold and windy and he had work to do so I let him go but watched for a while — from the warmth of the truck.  Those scientists were earning their money — it was nasty weather – fit for ducks.

“Have you got a transmitter on board?”

It was a wonderful chance encounter with an interesting research operation.  And while it is tough for me to sort out the three kinds of scoters we see in this area, I’ll probably never see another one in the air without thinking, “have you got a transmitter on board?”

Decline of American Kestrels

American Kestrel“One autumn day, 15 years ago, I found myself perched on a ladder that was leaning against a highway sign on Interstate 89 somewhere in Vermont. There was a wooden box clamped to one of the sign poles at least 15 feet off the ground, although fear may have exaggerated that memory. I was providing a little autumn house-keeping for one of those nest boxes so it’d be ready when the kestrels returned to breed the next spring,” writes guest blogger Madaline Bodin in Adirondack Almanack.

“The box was one of 10 kestrel nest boxes then deployed along the interstate by the Vermont Agency of Transportation, or VTrans. It’s a feel-good project started in 1995 with $40, some scrap wood, and plenty of volunteer hours from VTrans employees, who built the boxes on their own time. Since then, about 90 kestrels have fledged and four orphaned young were fostered in the boxes. That’s a lot of bang for the buck, or rather, a lot of birds for the box.

“The American kestrel – found in New York, Vermont and New Hampshire (and throughout North and South America) – is the smallest falcon in North America. They are tiny for a raptor – about the size of a blue jay – but are fierce predators…..

“Fifteen years ago, three of the highway nest boxes hosted breeding kestrels. There was hope that more of the boxes would be used as kestrels discovered them. They haven’t, but that may be because there just aren’t enough kestrels around to use them. Kestrels are in slow decline in much of North America and have been for over 30 years, but are currently listed as a species of “least concern” on the endangered species list….”  Read whole article here.

photo by John Picken

Introducing the Birds of Paradise

This fall, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Geographic are bringing the Birds-of-Paradise Project to the public with a coffee-table book, a major exhibit at the National Geographic Museum (opening November 1), a documentary on the National Geographic Channel (airing at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT November 22), articles in the Cornell Lab’s Living Bird magazine and National Geographic magazine, and National Geographic Live lectures across the country. Her’s an advance look.

Do You Drink Bird-Friendly Coffee? Cornell Offers Guidance

Imagine you walk into the neighborhood coffee house for your morning cup of joe, and on the counter is a tip jar with a sign reading, “$ for wintering warblers” with a photo of a Chestnut-sided Warbler in a tropical forest.  You’d drop your change in, right? Any proud bird watcher would do their part for the wellbeing of the sprightly warblers that delight us so much come spring.

Coffee bushes

Shade grown coffee bushes in the cloud forest. Copan Coffee Tour – Finca Santa Isabel, Copan Ruinas, Honduras

It’s not such a stretch of the imagination, York University researcher Bridget Stutchbury told a packed audience at the Cornell Lab’s Monday night seminar series last week. Many of the colorful songbirds that are just now leaving us for the winter, including warblers, tanagers, orioles, and grosbeaks, will spend the next five months in and around shade coffee plantations in Mexico and Central and South America.

But only if the birds can find them. Shade-coffee plantations—particularly ones that grow coffee under a natural forest canopy—are increasingly being deforested, leaving North American migrants with fewer places to spend the winter. The good news, Stutchbury said, is that you can have your dark roast and your songbirds too if you buy sustainable coffee, particularly Bird Friendly coffee.

Read the excellent article by Cornell Lab science editor Gustave Axelson

Photo credit: Adalberto.H.Vega

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Duck, Geese — Hunting Season is Near

I have been reading Julie Zickfoose’s fine book, The Bluebird Effect.  It’s a series of stories about bird rehabilitation and observation and is the kind of book that is nice to take your time reading.  I have it on the iPad and read a chapter or two a week.  Her chapter “Love and Death among the Cranes” brought back some memories from last year and raised some issues on hunting and birding.

Last year, we travelled to the Southwest with our Airstream trailer.  We were planning to come down I-81 and when I heard of a rare Hooded Crane hanging out with the Sandhill Cranes at the Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge in Tennessee.  I blogged about it — we saw hundreds of cranes and a Ross’s Goose but the Hooded Crane was not around while we were there.  What I did see was Sandhill Cranes in fields everywhere and learned that Tennessee was considering opening up a hunting season for them.  (They delayed the decision for a couple of years.)

Julie writes passionately about the controversy in her book and on her blog.  I’m not anti-hunting but do have issues with the shooting of majestic birds like Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese.  And now, our local little pond, a quiet water supply for Vermont’s capitol city, is not only now opened for non-motorized boating but also probably duck and geese hunting.  Hundreds of birders are angry, worried, depressed, feeling helpless, or all of the above.  It makes me wonder why I have a duck stamp on my binoculars.

The storyline goes like this:  Birders and other frequenters of National Wildlife Refuges should purchase a $15 Federal Duck Stamp each year in order to gain free admission to refuges. Conservationists buy Federal Duck Stamps because they know that the stamps are, dollar for dollar, one of the best investments one can make in the future of America’s wetlands. For every dollar you spend on Federal Duck Stamps, ninety-eight cents goes directly to purchase vital habitat for protection in the National Wildlife Refuge System.

So, every year, I buy a duck stamp at the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge (even though I have a life-long Senior Pass) and put it prominently on my binoculars.  The word is that the majority of stamps are bought by non-hunters but even if that is the case, we get little or no credit in surveys.

Here’s how blogger Mike puts it:   When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service puts together the National Survey, it ascribes zero dollars of Duck Stamp purchases to wildlife watchers. Zero. If you can find the statement in the National Survey that acknowledges that some of the Duck Stamp money comes from wildlife watchers, I’ll eat my beloved Midwest Birding Symposium hat (or more likely just some wild duck.) But that’s not going to happen.

So, when I go to Parker River or over to Lake Champlain and hear the guns booming just outside the refuges, I’ll try to remember that money from licenses, shells, stamps, etc goes toward habitat and that hunters love birds as much as we do — with a nice bottle of wine on the side.