Category: Bird Friendly

Lest you think that we live in an isolated world where nothing outside can hurt us and where we do not need to fix a problem that occurs far away,please read this article from the Smithsonian Magazine. Simply put, it tells us about gold mining in the Amazon and how this is a cause of the decline in Purple Martin populations in the United States. Surprisingly, it has nothing to do with habitat loss. It involves a very subtle physiochemical dynamic in the effect of mercury on fat storage in the birds.:

Brazilian ecologist Jonathan Maycol Branco had a problem. Unlike the migratory birds he was studying, he couldn’t fly north.

In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic had hindered the University of São Paulo graduate student’s plans to head to Northern Arizona University to complete his master’s thesis on the eastern North American subspecies of purple martin. The migratory bird, which molts in the Amazon Basin and then flies north to breed in North America, has declined over the past five decades, at a rate of almost 1 percent a year. But why? Branco and his advisors in both the United States and Brazil suspected the birds were being contaminated by a specific heavy metal prevalent in their wintering home in South America.
So when Branco was grounded by canceled flights, physiological ecologist C. Loren Buck, of Northern Arizona University, called in other scientists who were on campus to help. Citizen scientists in Wisconsin and Virginia, along with scientists in Florida, had collected feathers and sent them to Arizona. Buck’s team ran tests on the purple martins’ tail feathers, where both contaminants and hormones tend to accumulate. They also looked at notes about the birds’ body conditions, including their mass and fat. Once they had the raw data in hand, they sent it to Branco in Brazil. He looked at the numbers and developed statistical models to determine what they actually meant. The results didn’t surprise him.

“We expected to find mercury in the feathers,” Branco says. “But what was most striking was the correlation between the level of mercury in the purple martins and their fat score.”

The higher the level of mercury found in the birds, the lower their fat score. In his study published this past December in Environmental Pollution, Branco notes that the concentration of mercury found in the birds could be what is negatively impacting their ability to accumulate fat. The birds likely pick up the mercury in their winter home in the Amazon Basin. After they fly up to North America, the heavy metal in their bodies likely makes them unable to store fat, leaving them without enough energy to migrate south every year. Even a small increase in the amount of the heavy metal in the birds, which are part of the swallow family, likely leads to poor health and a decreased chance of survival.

The Amazon Basin is known as a hot spot for mercury contamination. Natural inorganic mercury washes down from mercury beds in the Andes. But methylmercury that has started to accumulate in the region thanks to human endeavors is more dangerous. Methylmercury is very sticky and gets caught up in the tissues of animals, making it extremely difficult for them to eliminate, says Buck.

Read more here:

Note: Purple Martins have been seen at Sedona Wetlands in Spring and Fall

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Read this article from the Center For Biological Diversity

One of the first imperiled animals the Center championed, the southwestern willow flycatcher has suffered more than a century of steady decline. Livestock grazing, dams, water withdrawal, and sprawl have robbed the sentinel-like songbird of more than 90 percent of its riparian habitat — and left it all the more vulnerable to other birds that prey on its eggs or use its nests to incubate their own eggs. After a Center petition and years of legal wrangling, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finally declared the flycatcher endangered in 1995, but it’s been plagued with administration disregard ever since.
 

As destruction of southwestern streamside forests continues, the Center is taking concrete action to win adequate protections for flycatcher habitat. In 2008 we sued over a politically motivated Bush-era decision that reduced the bird’s protected habitat by more than two-thirds of the area originally proposed after a Center lawsuit — and in 2013, the Obama administration protected more than 200,000 acres along 1,227 miles of river. In 2009, we went to court over a plan allowing an imported tamarisk leaf-eating beetle to seriously harm flycatcher habitat in southern Utah and northern Arizona. Simultaneously, we’re defending flycatcher habitat along Arizona’s San Pedro River from unsustainable groundwater pumping, off-road vehicle destruction and other ecosystem threats.

Since the flycatcher’s listing, the Center has won an injunction protecting a critical flycatcher population at Lake Isabella, California; convinced the U.S. Forest Service to remove cattle from rivers in Arizona and New Mexico; produced a pivotal report on the bird’s status; and helped develop a federal recovery plan. In 1996, we sued the Bureau of Reclamation for not analyzing the effects of enlarging Arizona’s Roosevelt Dam, which was to flood out the state’s largest flycatcher population. And in 2000, we reached a landmark settlement with the Forest Service to protect 50 endangered species — including the flycatcher — in Southern California’s four national forests.

These birds have been seen at Bubbling Ponds

Bird identification in the field can be difficult. Read this article from Cornell Labs: Building Skills: The 4 Keys to Bird Identification | All About Birds All About Birds

With more than 800 species of birds in the U.S. and Canada, it’s easy for a beginning bird watcher to feel overwhelmed by possibilities. Field guides seem crammed with similar-looking birds arranged in seemingly haphazard order. We can help you figure out where to begin.

First off: where not to start. Many ID tips focus on very specific details of plumage called field marks—the eyering of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet; the double breast band of a Killdeer. While these tips are useful, they assume you’ve already narrowed down your search to just a few similar species.

So start by learning to quickly recognize what group a mystery bird belongs to. You do this in two ways: by becoming familiar with the general shape, color, and behavior of birds, and by keeping a running tally in your head of what kinds of birds are most likely to be seen in your location and time of year.

Of course you’ll need to look at field marks—a wingbar here, an eyering there—to clinch some IDs. But these four keys will quickly get you to the right group of species, so you’ll know exactly which field marks to look for.

Put The 4 Keys Into Practice

Bird watchers can identify many species from just a quick look. They’re using the four keys to visual identification: Size & Shape, Color Pattern, Behavior, and Habitat. Practice with these common birds to see how the 4 keys work together:

You can also see the 4 keys in action in our free Inside Birding series of instructional videos.

You can also see the 4 keys in action in our free Inside Birding series of instructional videos.

BLACK-CAPPED CHICKADEE

Size & Shape: Tiny bird with large head, plump body, narrow tail, and short bill

Color Pattern: Shiny black cap and throat against white cheeks. Buffy sides; wings and back soft gray

Behavior: Busy, acrobatic, and often in feeding flocks of several species

Habitat: Forests, woodlots, backyards, and shrubby areas; in the West, associated with deciduous trees

Look for this bird on the Jail Trail

CEDAR WAXWING

Size & Shape: A sleek songbird with a swept-back crest, plump body and square-tipped tail

Color Pattern: Silky gray-brown, with yellow belly and red and yellow accents on wings and tail

Behavior: Often in large flocks, eating berries or catching insects over open water, giving high trilling call

Habitat: Woodlands, orchards, parks, and treed suburbs

Find Cedar Waxwings in the Spring at Bubbling Ponds

KILLDEER

Size & Shape: A large plover with large bill, large eye, and round head; long legs

Color Pattern: Golden brown above with two dark bands across the white breast

Behavior: Runs swiftly along ground or breaks into stiff-winged flight with shrill kill-deer call

Habitat: Open grassy and rocky areas, often far from water, including parking lots, lawns, and driveways

Killdeer are easily spotted at Bubbling Ponds

CHIPPING SPARROW

Size & Shape: A small, compact, fairly flat-headed sparrow with a long, notched tail

Color Pattern: Crisp, frosty gray-white below, striking rufous cap with black line through eye

Behavior: Often in flocks; feeds on open ground, sings from high in trees, often evergreens

Habitat: Open woodlands, forests with grassy clearings, parks, roadsides, yards

 

NEW YORK – Audubon invites photographers and videographers to submit to the 2023 Audubon Photography Awards, open for entries from January 11, 2023, until March 1, 2023, at 12 p.m. (noon) ET. Judges will award eight prizes to photographers and videographers: the Grand Prize, Professional Prize, Amateur Prize, Youth Prize, Plants for Birds Prize, Fisher Prize, Female Bird Prize, and Video Prize.

For the third year, Audubon will award the Female Bird Prize and the Video Prize. The Female Bird Prize continues to showcase the beauty of female birds, which are often underappreciated and under-researched in both birding and science. The Video Prize once again will be awarded to the top video demonstrating unique bird behaviors or highlighting birdlife in its habitat.

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Darwin has been proven correct once again! A large study of Mt. Chickadees has shown that local environmental conditions actually cause genetic variations – read here: inherited behavioral characteristics. This is true not only between species, but between populations of the same species. This study differentiates learned behavior that is simply passed on through generations and the ability to learn which is inherited giving individuals survival skills independently of elder interactions. This is the old battle between Darwin and Lamarck regarding why there are so many species of birds. It is the argument of evolution by Natural Selection or by inherited of acquired characteristics. Remember this: Darwin’s book was called Origin of Species; not Origin of THE species. It’s a book about mechanisms or processes.

“For many animal species, “intelligence” (however one might choose to measure it) is meaningless; in whatever habitat, whatever lifestyle they find themselves adapted for, it doesn’t help them survive and reproduce, and so it’s irrelevant.  “As humans, we think smarter is al­ways better,” says Branch, “but it’s not.”  

The Pravosudov lab’s growing body of research on Mountain Chickadees is showing, however, that when it comes to surviving the harshest of winters, spatial memory—the ability to store and recover food—is the crucial factor that decides whether a chickadee lives to raise babies and pass on their genes or perishes in the snow.” 

This is a long article and will require some energy spent with reflection, but it is worth it. Read this article from Cornell Lab’s “All About Birds” – read more.

Friends of the Verde River received the 2022 Resilience Prize for its work finding and putting to work solutions to ensure the long-term health of the Verde, one of Arizona’s few rivers to flow year-round from its headwaters to its confluence with another waterway.

The Cottonwood-based group focuses on restoring habitat, sustaining river flows and bringing the community together for on-the-ground projects aimed at improving the health of the Verde.

Please open the video to see the story.

This article appeared in the “Smithsonian Magazine:

Pollinators like bees, butterflies, bats and moths help farmers grow healthy foods. They support the production of vegetables, fruits, nuts and legumes—but now, when there are fewer pollinators around to help plants reproduce, crop yields are decreasing.

A new study finds the world is losing 3 to 5 percent of its fruit, vegetable and nut production because of shrinking pollinator populations and lower pollinator diversity. Those losses, in turn, mean that people have less healthy food to eat and suffer from associated health conditions like diabetes and heart disease.

Based on modeling, these health effects lead to an estimated 427,000 excess deaths per year—on the same order of magnitude as prostate cancer, interpersonal violence and substance use disorders, according to the researchers.

Read the full article by clicking on the photo