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Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal

Birding researchConservationMigrationSpecies

Here’s a springtime gift: Powerful new birding tools arrive just in time for the migration

by Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal
written by Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal

For years, the twice-a-year migration of billions of birds was one of nature’s most spectacular events that we never really got to see. That’s because most of the action takes place out of sight, far above us and often at night.

That began to change in the last decade with new technologies for tracking birds, and last week brought a milestone: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology completed a massive project that creates maps and animations for nearly all North American species.

The result is an unprecedented view of how birds move, arriving just in time for the spring migration.

This is big news for anyone interested in birds. The data in this project, all of which is free, will strengthen everything from scientific research and conservation to the power and precision of the tools you use on the birding trail.

The impacts are so far-reaching that Beverly and I couldn’t agree on what’s most important here. So we thought we’d each make our case and let you come to your own conclusions.

Canada Warbler / Photo by James Hully, Macaulay Library, Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Beverly: The best way to appreciate this work is to start by looking at one of these animations. They’re beautiful, with patches of bright colors flowing back and forth across a map of the hemisphere that represent migrating birds week by week throughout the year.  I think these are the most compelling — and entertaining — of all the maps and illustrations that come under Cornell’s eBird umbrella. You can find a complete list of the maps by species here on the Cornell website.

For example, here’s an animation of how the tiny Canada Warbler travels the length of the hemisphere twice a year. 

Not only can you watch the warblers’ weekly progress from far north Canada to Latin America and back, but you can use these maps to help figure out when they’re like to pass by you. And when you’re trying to find a bird you’ve never seen before, knowing exactly when the largest flocks are arriving is a huge help.

Anders: The point is that animations like the Canada Warbler, along with abundance, range and breeding maps, now exist for 610 species, which make up almost all of the species in North America, in archives Cornell calls status and trends maps.

The lab began putting these together about two years ago as a way to convert their raw bird data into compelling maps and show how birds move through the seasons of the year. The first batch of maps covered about 20 percent of the species, but the addition of the rest of the species opens all sorts of possibilities for comprehensive research and conservation approaches.

“This is a big jump in terms of the utility of the data project,’’ said Daniel Fink, a senior research associate at the Cornell Lab.

Go to the end of this post for a summary of the full lineup of birding options from Cornell. 
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How on earth? Great White Pelican shows up on the other side of the world

by Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal
written by Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal

It wasn’t a Great White Shark, but for Florida’s best birders, it may as well have been. When the first reports hit that a Great White Pelican – usually found in Africa or India – had been spotted in a wildlife refuge near Titusville, well, you can imagine what happened next.

This is one of the largest birds in the world with a wingspan that can reach 12 feet. And even though it has the strength to cross an ocean without stopping, people couldn’t quite believe it had somehow landed in Florida.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves, but here’s a close-up of our Great White Pelican.

The first photo two weeks ago showed a distant bird that looked like the American White Pelican, only much bigger with a striking orange and pinkish tint. There’s also a diamond-shaped patch of day-glow orange over its eyes.

Then came several sporadic sightings around the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, a vast wilderness spanning 140,000 acres with one 7-mile road winding through. More often than not, the reports were of dashed hopes and a flock of regular pelicans seen from afar.

But the spottings persisted, and Florida Facebook birding sites lit up with speculation about the pelican’s whereabouts. So without much to go on, we drove up from our camping spot an hour south of Titusville to see if we could find this guy.

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Birding researchConservation

Why 3 billion birds vanished: Understanding the startling new research

by Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal
written by Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal

First in a series

Many causes contribute to the losses. Solutions will be just as complex.

Three billion birds have vanished in North America in the span of a single lifetime. They’re just gone. It’s as simple as that. But at the same time, this staggering finding from the study of bird populations published last weekj in the journal Science is so complex — the number so large — it’s hard to get your arms around it.

What does it mean to the environment, to the balance of nature, to the species themselves, that roughly a quarter of the avian population has disappeared since 1970?

In the coming weeks, we’ll explore these and others questions raised by the research that has uncovered a crisis over the future of birds in U.S. and Canada. Upcoming posts will look at why people should care, what these findings mean for other segments of wildlife and where the research will go from here.

The study shows that a combination of forces more powerful than previously thought is wreaking havoc across almost all bird species, according to its authors, scientists and researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Smithsonian, the American Bird Conservancy and four other institutions.

Some of the causes are indisputable: The most obvious is the way the places birds live are being developed at a pace affecting not just endangered species but our most common birds as well. It runs from the general to the specific. For example,  the loss of grasslands to farming and housing has cost of the lives of half the Eastern and Western Meadowlarks and a huge numbers of sparrows. Many coastal species are hurt by the fact that so many people now live along beaches and waterways that birds are being squeezed out. At the same time, rising water levels are impacting the shallows where many species live and breed.

And then there’s the problem of insects. As their names imply, species like flycatchers and swallows survive on bugs, and they’re disappearing, too, due in part to newer types of powerful insecticides called Neonicotinoids. Warming trends are throwing off the life cycles of birds and cutting into their nesting and breeding seasons that fuel future generations.

A Scientific American graphic on the study.

The declines have been devastating to birds, but they also signal broader shifts in environments that all life forms depends on.

“We can do better, and we must, if only in our own self-interest, because trouble for birds means trouble for us as well,” Cornell Lab CEO John Fitzpatrick and Peter Marra, director of the newly created Georgetown Environmental Initiative, wrote in an essay for the New York Times this week.

While some causes are clear, the declines of certain species mystify researchers. The loss of millions of migratory birds — which make up about 40 percent of overall population — are a puzzle, since they rely on environments spread all across the hemisphere and make arduous trips twice a year that expose them to all sorts of hazards.

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BirdingBirding researchConservation

What will it take to mobilize the country’s birders?

by Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal
written by Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal

Our long-planned visit to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y., this week began just as the White House announced plans to weaken the Endangered Species Act. The move seemed to strike at the heart of the lab’s work to protect birds in a time of accelerating declines.

We were at the lab for a day of interviews on all sorts of topics, but conversations kept circling back to these changes to the law. Many birds are already threatened by the combination of habitat loss, urbanization, pesticides and early impacts of climate change.

Specimens of extinct species are part of the research collection.

What will happen if the bedrock legislation that helped restore and preserve the Bald Eagle, the Peregrine Falcon, the Alligator, the Grizzly Bear and countless threatened bird species loses its teeth?

A second question kept coming up from members of the staff of more than 200 researchers, scientists, archivists, photographers and computer specialists:

What would it take for the millions of Americans who care about birds to come together on a scale equal to the threats so many species are facing?

“The bottom line is that we need to have a voice,’’ said Ken Rosenberg, an applied conservation scientist who works both for the Cornell Lab and the Washington-based American Bird Conservancy. “We need to be a force that the politicians have to reckon with.”

Executive Director John Fitzpatrick

This isn’t a new question when it comes to birders. It’s hard to pin down their exact numbers in the U.S., but government surveys put the number at around 40 million people. They range from backyard birders to weekend birders to those who’ll travel wherever the latest rare species can be found.

That’s a huge group that has so far remained passive and diffused through a rising tide of bad news for birds. The authoritative State of the World’s Birds Report concluded last year that 40 percent of the Earth’s species are in decline. A May United Nation’s study predicted that a million species of birds, animals, plants and insects are threatened with extinction in the coming decades if action isn’t taken.

More research along these lines is on the way: The most comprehensive report ever conducted on the state of North American birds is about to be released in a scientific study on what’s happened to the overall bird population over a span of 50 years.

The findings, assembled jointly by all the major bird organizations, are embargoed. But many who’ve worked on the study say its conclusions are alarming enough to serve as a call to action.

Will bird-lovers answer that call?

At the Cornell Lab, researchers have been chronicling the vital role that birds play in the balance of nature since 1915. Executive Director John Fitzpatrick, who has shaped the lab into the research and digital powerhouse it’s become, makes the point that birds are the key to understanding our environment.

“They are literally the heartbeat of the Earth’s system,’’ he said. “They tell us how nature works.’’

Director John Fitzpatrick and Cornell staff writer Pat Leonard look over lab specimens.

 

The lab’s mission is science and information, leaving the outright advocacy to others. But lab staffers seem to agree that it will take more than the traditional arguments to mobilize the country’s birders in the same way the National Rifle Association, for instance, advocates for gun ownership or hunters push for protection of game species.

Today, even if the groups were to fully mobilize birders, it’s not clear how those interests would be represented in the political realm, or how funds might be collected to power a broad campaign. “The truth is, there’s no mechanism for that to be done,’’ said Rosenberg.

The major birding organizations are indeed pushing for protections, lobbying government agencies and legislators and speaking out on the issues of the day. The Audubon Society published an immediate response to the reshaped Endangered Species Act Tuesday. More pressure is certain to follow as the likely impacts of the these changes become clear.

Mike Webster, director of the lab’s Macaulay Library that collects and organizes millions of bird photos, recordings and videos.

But each of the bird groups has separate emphases, and while they work together on select projects, they have yet to create a true omnibus campaign that might help to unite their supporters. 

As the news from Washington circulated through the lab, the question of how to pull that off was on the minds of everyone we talked to. 

“Awareness is no longer the bar,’’ said John Bowman, head of the lab’s Conservation Media program that produces vivid reports to support the lab and its partners. “Changing behavior is the bar.’’

A portion of the lab’s enormous mural that shows every major species type around the world — along with species that have become extinct since the arrival of humans on Earth

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Why now is the best time to jump on the birding bandwagon

by Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal
written by Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal

The buzz was as loud as a flock of hungry seagulls when four birding groups gathered to celebrate a new guidebook by the Smithsonian’s Bruce Beehler last week in Washington, D.C. For many of them, after five months of winter, this was the first chance they’d had to talk about their favorite birding spots, conservation plans, tools of the trade and upcoming outings.

At long last, the highlight of the birding year – the spring migration — is just a week or two from its peak in much of the country, and so there’s a lot to talk about.

The party got us thinking of how much birding advice and wisdom there is, and also about the many people who ask us how to get started. So we sat down for a conversation with Beehler, a Smithsonian research associate at the National Museum of Natural History’s Division of Birds, whose encyclopedic new book is called, Birds of Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia. We also interviewed experts from a cross section of the leading bird institutions — Audubon, Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, and the American Bird Conservancy.

On at least one fact, everyone agrees: If you want to be a birder, there’s no better time to start than now. Every spring, about half of the 650 species in the Western Hemisphere are on the move. From mid-February to mid-June, between 4 and 5 billion birds will fly thousands of miles to reach their breeding grounds.

Smithsonian author and ornithologist Bruce Beehler

“The birds are singing, and they have their spring plumage,’’ Beehler said. “In the spring, the birds are going to come to you, you don’t need to go to them. They’re going to pass right through your backyard, whether you know it or not. That can be pretty darn exciting.’’

We’ve boiled all of this advice down to six short suggestions for how to make the most of the spring migration. This kicks off a series of posts on preparing for the migration that you’ll find on Flying Lessons in the coming weeks. Many of today’s suggestions are aimed at novices, but we hope they’ll also serve as helpful reminders to anyone gearing up for a new birdwatching season. 

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