Category Archives: Musings & News

No Birds Here

August 16, 2013Musings & News, Tenth PageKate St. John

Downtown Pittsburgh from the Ft Pitt Bridge (photo from Wikimedia Commons) — On the Fort Pitt Bridge, Pittsburgh (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Which place has fewer birds: a city? or a cornfield?

When birders visit cities they often think, “There are no birds here.” This isn’t accurate, but I think so, too, until I realize there’s a very high quantity of birds but low quality — lots of pigeons, starlings and house sparrows. It’s the lack of diversity that prompts the comment.

Bird diversity is highest where the habitat provides a wide variety of food, cover and nesting sites. A 20-year study of abandoned fields on Long Island found that bird diversity increased with the foliage height. Since there’s not much foliage in cities the birds we find here are those who nest on or in buildings and eat human refuse or handouts — and the birds who prey on them (peregrines!).

Most songbirds eat insects and invertebrates which are hard to come by in the asphalt jungle. Even hummingbirds who sip nectar feed insects to their young. If you want birds you must have insects.

Places without insects are biological wastelands because they’re also missing everything that depends on insects, all the way up the food chain. Here’s a picture of a wasteland. There are no birds here.

Cornfield in Penn Yan (photo by Jamie Lantzy via Wikimedia Commons) — Cornfield (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

I bet you’re thinking, “That’s not possible. There are plants in that cornfield. There have got to be insects and birds there too.”

No. There aren’t. Today in the U.S. we use more pesticides than we did when Rachel Carson warned us about them in Silent Spring.(1)

90% of the corn we grow is genetically engineered to survive the assaults of herbicides, fungicides and insecticides. This allows cornfields to be sprayed frequently(2) without hurting the corn. Corn seed is also coated with insecticide, neonicotinoids, that imbue the plant with poison.

There are no insects in cornfields, no birds, and no plants except corn. I was amazed when I found out about this at Cornstalks Everywhere But Nothing Else, Not even a Bee.

Not even a bee! Hmmmm…

(credits: photo of Pittsburgh from the Fort Pitt Bridge and a cornfield, both from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the originals. Today’s Tenth Page is inspired by page 620 of Ornithology by Frank B. Gill.)

I Will Sing With You

August 6, 2013Musings & News, SongbirdsKate St. John

Nightingale singing in Berlin ()photo by J. Dietrich via Wikimedia Commons — Nightingale singing in Berlin (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Yesterday while on my way to somewhere else , I discovered a blog called Goldbird Variations that began when the author started playing music for birds.

Years ago Lisa Rest of Chicago took up the piano again and often played with her window open. One day a mourning dove flew to the windowsill and sang along. She didn’t understand what it was doing until later, wanting to share her music with an audience, she rediscovered that the birds were listening outside her window and singing as she played.

Soon she began intentionally playing music for birds, recording their duets and writing about her encounters. Now she’s hooked on birds and blogging. I know how that is!

Lisa has perfect pitch and can tell that the birds do too. Listen to a cardinal sing with her in this post that explains why birds are attracted to music.

Which leads to the nightingale above…

Lisa points out she’s not the only one to play music for birds. In May 1927 the BBC recorded Beatrice Harrison playing Londonderry Air on her cello in her garden in Surrey as a nightingale sang along. The bird waits for her phrases and blends in at appropriate times. Amazing! Click here to download and play the mp3 recording from the Music And Nature radio program.

I have neither perfect pitch nor musical skill but I’ve encountered birds’ interest in music when I whistle while I hike. I’m particularly fond of Bach and Beethoven and since I don’t sing well I whistle my favorite tunes.

Their favorite of my repertoire seems to be the second movement of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, Szene am Bach (Scene at the brook) from his Pastoral Symphony.

Of course the birds like that one!

(photo of a nightingale singing in Berlin. Click on the image to see the original on Wikimedia Commons. This post was inspired by the Goldbird Variations)

Mysterious Disappearance

July 31, 2013Musings & News, SongbirdsKate St. John

Male house sparrow (photo by David Lofink via Wikimedia Commons)

If you live in North America this fact is amazing: House sparrows are an endangered species in Britain.

I learned this when I read John Metcalfe’s article called Making Cities More Bird Friendly With Nesting Bricks. In it he describes a new brick specially designed by Aaron Dunkerton and manufactured in England to provide habitat for nesting house sparrows. Before mortar is applied it looks like this. (Click on the bricks to read about them.)

House sparrows are the most widely distributed wild bird on earth. Why are they so endangered in the U.K. that people invent ways to help them? Here’s what I found out.

Since 1977 house sparrows have declined by 71% in Britain. In some locations they are nearly extirpated. London’s Kensington Park had 2,603 house sparrows in 1925. By 2000 there were only 18.

Despite many studies a single cause has not been found and no other urban/suburban bird has experienced a similar decline.

In 2005 Kate E. Vincent published a house sparrow population study. In 2009 Lorna Margaret Shaw investigated the role of neighborhood socio-economic status in house sparrow abundance. These studies found:

The greatest house sparrow declines occurred where nestlings starved within a week of hatching or had low fledging weight, both due to lack of insect prey. The best success occurred where they ate plenty of aphids or spiders. (Aphids come up again!)
Because house sparrows nest in holes in buildings, they did well in neighborhoods built before 1919, in neighborhoods where soffitt and fascia were made of wood, and in distressed neighborhoods where the buildings needed repairs. They avoided neighborhoods built after 1985 because of new construction standards and lack of deterioration. That’s why Aaron Dunkerton invented the bird brick for new homes.
House sparrows did poorly in tidy neighborhoods with lots of paving. Over the years Britons have paved their front yards and removed trees and shrubs so they can park their cars. This has reduced house sparrow habitat.
All habitat was not equal. House sparrows preferred deciduous plants and the insects associated with them.
House sparrows did not use ornamentals or evergreens. This lead to a headline that Leylandii hedges were to blame for the house sparrow decline. (A fascinating topic…more on that tomorrow.)

With so many factors in play there’s no simple answer to the house sparrow’s mysterious disappearance. In the meantime they continue to decline and Britons miss them terribly.

If it would work I’d package some of ours and send them to England. We have a house sparrow surplus right now.

(photo of a house sparrow in California from Wikimedia Commons. Nesting bricks by Aaron Dunkerton. Click on the images to see their originals.)

Will They Kill 3,600 Barred Owls?

July 29, 2013Birds of Prey, Musings & NewsKate St. John

Barred Owl (photo by Chuck Tague) — Barred owl (photo by Chuck Tague)

July 29, 2013

A troubling plan slipped under the radar of Easterners who care about barred owls and native birds.

In the Pacific Northwest, northern spotted owls have been listed as threatened since 1990 under the Endangered Species Act. The number one cause for their decline is the logging of old-growth forest. The logging stopped in the national forests in 1991 but the spotted owl continues to decline, especially in smaller forest tracts left behind by logging.

Barred owls are distant relatives of the northern spotted owl and formerly lived only east of the Great Plains. In the 100 years barred owls have slowly spread north and west and now inhabit the Pacific Northwest as well.

In recent years biologists studying spotted owls noticed the spotteds declined in zones where barreds increased, so U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed killing barred owls as an experiment to see if this helps the northern spotted owl.

The proposal, published in March 2012 as a Draft Environmental Impact Statement, included a public comment period. We may not have noticed the proposal but westerners saw and commented.

The comments were overwhelmingly negative from “Don’t do it!” to “This is stupid!” to an excellent letter by biologist Elizabeth Ellis who has studied northern spotted owl populations and pointed out the flaws in the proposal including the lack of barred owl population studies (it is threatened in parts of its range!), unknown human contribution — if any — to the barred owl’s range movement, the fact that the proposal tracts where barred owls have gained a foothold are known to be too small to adequately protect the northern spotted owl, and the wisdom of using limited management funds to kill an unstudied species.

If I’d had a chance to comment I would have said… (stepping up on my soapbox)…

Humans directly caused the disappearance of 90% of the Pacific Northwest old growth forest. When species are going extinct because of our actions we have a choice: Do we cut down the last 10% of the forest or stop logging? We can control the things that humans do, however…

We cannot control the rest of Nature. Humans did not actively introduce the barred owl. We don’t fully know why it arrived. It is hubris to think we can control what’s happening by killing it.

The barred owl is so closely related to the northern spotted owl that the two can interbreed. The barred owl may be adding strong genes that the spotted owls need to survive. Interbreeding is anathema to species purists but it’s how nature works. Would we cull blue-winged warblers because they interbreed with and seem to out-compete the less abundant golden-winged warbler? Culling native birds to protect a favorite species is a dangerous precedent.

The Pacific Northwest is not an isolated island so barred owls will continue to naturally arrive in the northern spotted owl’s territory. If the proposed experiment works the culling will have to continue as long as humans have the stomach and the money to do it.

I could go on and on…

At this point it is up to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to decide whether to go forward with their plan. I hope they drop it like a hot potato!

(stepping down from my soapbox…)

Thanks for listening.

Click here for information from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife website on their plan to kill 3,600 barred owls in the Pacific Northwest.

(barred owl in Florida, photo by Chuck Tague)

Unexpected Consequences

July 22, 2013Climate Change, Insects, Musings & NewsKate St. John

Black rat snake (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

22 July 2013

The headline read: Snakes devour more mosquito-eating birds as climate change heats forests.

Oh no!

In a recently published study, University of Missouri biologist John Faaborg analyzed 20 years of nesting data in the Missouri Ozarks forest and found a direct correlation between hotter nesting seasons and nest failure.

The reason? Snakes.

Twenty years ago the Ozark forest was cold enough that bird-eating snakes were less active and less hungry but hotter years have changed that. Among others, acadian flycatchers and indigo buntings have borne the brunt of the snakes’ new-found activity.

Faaborg’s finding is bolstered by a University of Illinois study published last January that predicts increased nighttime snake activity as an outcome of climate change.

University of Illinois researcher Patrick Weatherhead and his students studied black rat snakes in Texas, Illinois and Ontario as a proxy for hot, moderate, and cool climates. They fitted the snakes with tiny temperature-sensitive radio transmitters which enabled them to know the snakes’ location and the ambient temperature. Temperature is important because snakes are cold-blooded. The researchers also placed cameras on hundreds of birds’ nests so they’d know exactly what happened and when.

The results were frightening for birds. In Texas the days are too hot for black rat snakes so they’re mostly active at night. Unfortunately this is very bad for nesting birds because they can’t see the snakes coming. Not only do the snakes eat the eggs and nestlings but they often eat the female parent because she’s caught on the nest unawares.

In Ontario the nights are too cold for snakes so they’re only active during the day. When snakes approached nests in daylight, the adults left the nests and raised alarms which attracted hawks to come eat the snakes. Nesting birds had a better chance for success in this cooler climate.

Illinois’ moderate climate showed that black rat snakes are adaptable. When nighttime temperatures were warm enough the snakes came out to hunt.

So climate change won’t just be hotter, stormier weather. Its unexpected consequences are not fun at all: More snake activity and fewer mosquito-eating birds.

Oh no!

(photo of a black rat snake from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the caption to see the original)

The Value of Species

June 30, 2013Books & Events, Insects, Musings & NewsKate St. John

turtle_woodturtle_rsz2_wikiWood Turtle (photo from Wikimedia Commons) — *Wood turtle (photo from Wikimedia Commons)*

Last weekend two pieces of a puzzle came together for me. I saw an endangered turtle and I read a thoughtful book, The Value of Species, that describes how our values shape his plight.

The wood turtle is approaching extinction because of bulldozers and collectors — habitat loss and the pet trade. He’s one of many species in this human-induced predicament. In fact so many species are declining now that scientists say we’re heading into a great extinction, perhaps on the scale of the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event that killed the dinosaurs.

Our actions cause decline and extinction yet we continue to do them. We’ve saved some species like the peregrine falcon with spectacular results but our overall track record is poor. New problems arise faster than we can stop them. Why?

In The Value of Species, Edward L. McCord explains that our values get in the way.

Human population growth is crowding out other species but we avoid thinking about our role in this problem.
We gladly protect an individual animal from harm but find it hard to protect an entire species.
We understand the monetary value of species but not their intrinsic value.
It’s hard for us to connect the need to save habitat (land) in order to save species.
Protections on land owned by the state for the common good can be trumped at the state level. (The book discusses mineral leases on national land in Mongolia. Marcellus leases in Pennsylvania’s State Forests is an example close to home.)
The common good erodes easily when people don’t trust that others will obey the rules. When a society lacks trust species are vulnerable.

Chapter Three, The Fate of Life on Earth Hinges on Property Values, is especially apt this week. On June 25 the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Koontz v. St. John’s River Water Management District made it harder for the common good of living things to compete with property values.

The short time span of property ownership is microscopic when weighed against species who’ve been on earth for two million years and could disappear in a matter of decades. “Still, many people are inclined to give individuals the right to reduce the living heritage of the earth for all future generations no matter how briefly they own a piece of property — even if only for a week.”⁽¹⁾

McCord describes a new and deeper way to see the intrinsic value of all species. When we do, we can change the trajectory of extinction by “drawing a line in the sand, something we do all the time to protect important values.”⁽²⁾

What will be the fate of the wood turtle? The Florida grasshopper sparrow? The red-breasted goose?

Ed McCord’s The Value of Species shows us the way to a brighter mutual future.

(photo of a wood turtle from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original.
Quotes from The Value of Species ⁽¹⁾page 51, ⁽²⁾page xvii
Edward McCord is the Director of Programming and Special Projects at the University of Pittsburgh’s Honors College)

p.s. Ed McCord gave a talk about the book at the University of Wyoming in April 2014. Click here for the video.

Bird In A Window

April 13, 2013Musings & NewsKate St. John

A hole that looks like a bird (photo by Tim Vechter)

This broken window caught Tim Vechter’s eye the other day.

Once you see the bird, it’s hard to see the window.

(photo by Tim Vechter)

p.s. I just noticed that the paint is worn off the windowsill where the opening meets the sill. Something is going in and out of that hole. Hmmm… !

Unnatural Selection

March 20, 2013Bird Behavior, Musings & NewsKate St. John

Cliff swallow like a butterfly (photo by Chuck Tague)

Cars and trucks have changed the cliff swallow.

For 30 years Charles Brown and his wife Mary Bomberger Brown have studied cliff swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) in southwestern Nebraska. They’ve meticulously monitored, measured and banded the birds at their nests under bridges and overpasses and they’ve counted and measured the road killed birds.

Their attention to detail has paid off in an unexpected way.

Cliff swallows attach their mud nests to cliffs or bridges. In Nebraska where there are few cliffs, the swallows use busy highway overpasses. If the swallows aren’t quick to fly up out of traffic they become road kill.

When the Browns began their study in 1982 they typically found 20 road killed cliff swallows per season, but since 2008 they’ve usually found less than five. The traffic has remained the same while the swallows’ population has more than doubled, yet the road kill numbers dropped dramatically.

What changed? The swallows changed!

The Browns’ data reveals that thirty years ago Nebraska’s cliff swallows had longer wingspans. Today’s shorter wings allow the birds to maneuver more quickly and turn away from oncoming vehicles. In fact, the few road killed birds they find today have longer wings than the rest of the population.

The shorter-winged birds survive to breed, the long-winged birds do not. In only 30 years, traffic’s unnatural selection has forced cliff swallows to evolve.

If traffic can do this to cliff swallows, I wonder what it’s done to Pennsylvania’s white-tailed deer.

Read more about this study in ScienceNOW.

(photo of a cliff swallow near the Rt. 528 bridge in Moraine State Park by Chuck Tague)

The Importance Of Fire

March 12, 2013Musings & News, TravelKate St. John

Early this month it was scary to read Chuck Tague’s account of a brush fire that came within two miles of his Ormond Beach home.

While the fired burned in Florida I was in another fire-prone place, San Diego, listening to a speech by Dr. John Fitzpatrick of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in which he touched on how important fire is for scrub habitats and for the survival of the Florida scrub-jay in particular.

To most of us wildfire is rare but it’s a natural cycle in scrub communities where plants, animals, and birds rely on its regular occurrence. “Regular” is important. If fire happens too often or too infrequently that’s bad too.

It has taken a while to learn this. Dr. Fitzpatrick described how they studied fire and birds at Archbold Station in Highlands County, Florida. For two decades Archbold suppressed fires and watched the scrub-jay population surge then dangerously decline. After 20 years scientists burned small tracts and watched the scrub-jays surge again. They learned that the Florida scrub-jay’s optimal habitat is at 5-15 years after a fire. At 15 years the scrub gets too tall, the jay’s predators increase and the birds decline.

Fire is necessary. The trick in populated areas is to manage it so it happens only when and where it’s needed.

In San Diego the local government conducts brush management programs to protect homes and businesses. According to San Diego Audubon, these programs sometimes make matters worse. If workers clear away native chaparral, it not only destroys endangered bird habitat but results in fire-prone grassy weeds that burn more easily. Proper management of native habitat actually lowers the risk of explosive fire.

So though we fear it, fire is important. Without it we wouldn’t have Florida scrub-jays, California gnatcatchers and coastal cactus wrens, to name a few.

(photo of a helicopter dropping water on a California wildfire, by FEMA via Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original.)

The Triple Fence

March 5, 2013Musings & News, TravelKate St. John

Border Fence at Canon de los Sauces, 2012 (photo by Jill Marie Holslin) — Border wall cuts off northern edges of La Cañada de Los Sauces or “Yogurt Canyon” (photo by Jill Marie Holslin used by permission)

5 March 2013

Travel is very educational. Not only are there different birds in San Diego but the threats those birds face are different from what I’m used to in Pittsburgh. One issue particularly grabbed my attention because we never have to deal with it at home.

Where I come from it’s hard to imagine the wall that defines the southern edge of San Diego County and most of the U.S. border from here through Texas. Like the Berlin Wall it’s patrolled by armed guards, edged by cleared land for easy enforcement, and in places triple-fenced.

The border has been patrolled for a long time but the Real ID Act of 2005 mandated the border wall and exempted its construction from every environmental law including the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. Exemptions like this bring to mind mountaintop removal in West Virginia.

During design of the Triple Fence, San Diego Audubon and other groups tried to prevent the worst environmental damage but it was impossible to stop the juggernaut. Now that the wall is up, they’re working with California State Parks and the Tijuana National Estuarine Research Reserve to monitor the wall’s effect on sedimentation, erosion, and invasive plants.

There are lots of problems to monitor. Here are just two examples.

The fence through Yogurt Canyon, shown above, disrupts the natural drainage into the Tijuana Estuary to the north. This affects everything that depends on the water, including birds.

At Border Field State Park, shown below, the wall’s construction leveled Litchy Mesa and filled Smugglers Gulch. There used to be a single fence. Now there’s a massive valley-fill and all the issues that come with it.

Smugglers Gulch before and during the Triple Fence project (photos by Jill Marie Holslin) — Border wall at Smugglers’ Gulch (photos by Jill Marie Holslin used by permission)

Ironically, the wall has an unintended consequence. In the old days workers used to migrate back and forth like the birds — north for planting and harvesting, south to their homes in the winter.

In his 2001 book, Crossing Over, Rubén Martínez described how the patrols even then were ending the return migration. It’s now so dangerous at the wall that those who make it to the U.S. rarely leave — because they can’t.

I’m sure that’s not the result the wall’s proponents had in mind.

Read more about the border fence and how it affects the land and people of Tijuana and San Diego in Jill Marie Holslin’s blog At The Edges.

(photos used by permission of Jill Marie Holslin from her blog, At the Edges. Click on each image for more information.)

Outside My Window

A Blog of Birds & Nature with Kate St. John