Live from the 2010 Ornithological Conference in San Diego

It’s time for another annual meeting of the American Ornithologists’ Union. Just like last year in Philadelphia and 2009 in  Portland, we’ll be bringing you stories from the floor of the meeting, where hundreds of ornithologists have gathered for four days of intense science.

First up is Living Bird editor Tim Gallagher to report on Monday’s plenary talk, given by University of Montana’s Ken Dial. Over the past decade, Dial and his collaborators have proposed a surprising new theory about how birds first began to fly. And with a wicked snowstorm shutting down air travel back East, the evolution of flight seemed perhaps the perfect topic. Read Tim’s account after the jump.

Great Backyard Bird Count… Or GREATEST Backyard Bird Count?

The 13th annual Great Backyard Bird Count coming up February 12-15 could be the greatest ever. It all depends on how many people heed the call to participate.

GBBC coordinator Pat Leonard likes to think of each checklist a bird watcher submits as illuminating a small but important part of North America—your neighborhood. Each is a single pixel—and the more pixels people send in, the sharper the picture we get of winter bird distributions across the continent. Here’s a bit more about the count from Pat:

The GBBC is pretty simple really. We ask that you watch and count birds anywhere you like for a minimum of 15 minutes on one or more days of the count. If you can’t identify a bird, you don’t have to report it. The most important thing to remember is to only report the highest number of each species you see together at any one time—that way you can be sure you’re not counting the same birds over and over. (Hey, can you tell two Black-capped Chickadees apart?!). You may submit your checklists over the four days of the count if you like, but you have until March 1 to enter your data at http://www.birdcount.org.

The GBBC is just plain fun (and easy) for the people who participate. For some, it’s a way to make a lifelong pursuit do double duty as they take information they’d be collecting anyway and share it with the GBBC. For others, it’s an awakening of sorts—and they get turned on to the world of birds when they first start paying attention to them for the Great Backyard Bird Count. It can be a passing of the torch, as adults introduce children to the joys of bird watching. GBBC participants seem to have an altruistic streak. We hear often how much they appreciate the idea of contributing to a continentwide project whose ultimate goal is to add information about bird populations to multiple, ongoing efforts to track birds so the data may be used for conservation.

Beyond the bird-watching part, there’s more fun! Each year we get thousands upon thousands of stunning entries in the GBBC photo contest. Anyone who participates in the count has a chance to win one of the great prizes contributed to the count in a random drawing. You’ll find bird games and quizzes on the GBBC kids’ page. You can also tweet about the birds you’re seeing—just add #gbbc to your message and it will appear in the Twitter widget on the GBBC home page. Become a fan on the GBBC Facebook page and invite others to try it out for the first time.

I have high hopes for another year of record-setting participation (dare we hope to break the 100,000 checklist mark?). We’ve added Bird Studies Canada as our Canadian partner this year, and thanks to sponsor QuebecOiseaux, we now have much of the website translated into French.

On behalf of the GBBC founding partners, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, as well as our new Canadian partner, Bird Studies Canada, I hope you’ll catch the fever and join us for the Great Backyard Bird Count, February 12-15!

(Images: Black-capped Chickadee by Shirley Gallant, Prince Edward Island, Canada; baby bird-watcher by Stacey Mote, Alabama; White-breasted Nuthatch by Nancy Brandt, Maine. All photos were submitted for the 2009 Great Backyard Bird Count.)

British Backyard Count Sets the Stage for Ours, Next Week

Is everyone ready for the Great Backyard Bird Count next weekend (Feb 12-15)? It’s your annual chance to help scientists by watching the birds in your backyard for as little as 15 minutes, then reporting your observations to us.

Birders in the United Kingdom just finished their own version of the count, called the Big Garden Birdwatch. They had great participation: 585,000 birdwatchers reported 8.5 million birds and 73 species. And the results are already proving enlightening: Long-tailed Tits were reported almost twice as commonly this year as last year, and scientists think that recent milder winters may be behind the apparent increase. On the flip side, over the 30 years the count has been going on, the data have revealed major declines in the isles’ native House Sparrow and European Starling populations—trends that are very hard to detect without the help of thousands of birders.

Over here in the New World, you can participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count from anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. (This year the website will even include a French-language option.) Details on how to participate are here, along with summaries of past counts, and photos submitted to our annual Great Backyard Bird Count photo contest.

Last year was a record-breaking year for participants: more than 94,000 checklists were submitted, you counted 620 species and more than 11 million individual birds, and your sightings helped us gauge the size of the biggest Pine Siskin irruption in years.

As you can see from those numbers, we have plenty of birds to count over here on our side of the pond. But there’s one place the British have us beaten—585,000 participants? For us Yanks to catch up, each one of us who participated last year would need to persuade five friends to watch this year. Sounds like a great project for this weekend! Anyone want to borrow a pair of binoculars?

(Image: Long-tailed Tit by Roeselien Raimond via Birdshare. The Great Backyard Bird Count is a joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, National Audubon Society, and Bird Studies Canada.)

Field Report: Birds That Sound Like Kazoos

Here’s part two of Jon Erickson’s report from his holiday visit to Round Island, 14 miles off Mauritius in the Indian Ocean:

Evenings on Round Island are quite special. The island is home to a large colony of Wedge-tailed Shearwaters that dig burrows into the loose soil to lay their eggs. After the sun goes down, the wedge-tails begin returning to the island in massive numbers and soon afterward they begin making their wonderful call.

Hear the “kazoo opera” sound of the Wedge-tailed Shearwater:

The best way to describe the call is to imagine a group of thousands of birds with kazoos taped to their bills. It is quite comical and I spent a good part of my first night laughing to myself in my tent. In fact, I got very little sleep for my entire two weeks on the island because of these birds. Not because they woke me up, but because I was recording the sounds from inside my tent with a long cable and a pair of stereo microphones outside.

The shearwaters are not as graceful as the petrels I wrote about last week. When scared, they take to the air no matter what’s in front of them, be it a wall, a tree, or, on one unfortunate evening, my face. There were so many around that they continually fell into the footing holes I was digging for the storage shed. Eventually I was forced to cover the holes, even while I was working nearby.

Watch me helping a shearwater back out of the hole:

I also got to help warden Tom with his weekly searches for keel-scaled boas, large nocturnal snakes found only on Round Island. This meant hiking in the dark across a rocky island shaped like a volcano sliced vertically down the middle. One search took us down into the central crater. With waves crashing below us and a full moon above us, we walked six feet apart looking for snakes and any other reptiles. Just at the end of our search, in the farthest corner of the quadrant, we found a large boa and Tom grabbed it. He handed it to me to hold as he measured and tagged it. The snake was beautiful as it wrapped its four-foot body around my arm. After searching for its tag we realized that this snake had never been captured before.  We were probably the first people to ever see this particular individual.

My two weeks on Round Island passed quickly catching petrels, searching for boas, giving water to giant tortoises (Aldabran tortoises have been brought here as on Ile aux Aigrettes), and building the storage shed. I accrued a massive collection of recordings: Herald Petrels (listen to it here), Wedge-tailed Shearwaters, Red-tailed and White-tailed tropicbirds, and even an accidental Black-winged Petrel, normally seen in the Pacific rather than the Indian Ocean. I had also had the chance to become intimate with some very rare and special species.

By the time I was waiting nervously on the landing rock for our return boat trip, I was already getting excited for my scheduled return to the island in mid-January. I hope to amass even more recordings and look forward to falling asleep to the birds with kazoos taped to their bills.

(Image: Jon Erickson takes time out from the Wedge-tailed Shearwaters to point his microphone at a nesting White-tailed Tropicbird)

Field Report: A Netful of Godwits

Last week Nate Senner told us about his return to Chiloé Island, Chile, and, after a few days, the mysterious disappearance of the Hudsonian Godwits he had come to study. He’s had a week to look for them, and yesterday he wrote in to tell us how it was going. It sounds like good news:

As quickly as those 3,000 godwits had disappeared, they came back again. After a couple days of frantically scouring the eastern part of Chiloé Island, we returned to Pullao for our normal check-in and found nearly 2,000 godwits feeding on the mudflats. They of course looked like nothing was out of the ordinary, going about their business eating worms and chasing off marauding Brown-hooded Gulls. When I saw them though, I felt like a father whose child has come home late from the playground. There was a little bit of anger—“Where were you?!”—but a lot more relief—“Ah, there you are!”  A few minutes later, all of that was forgotten and in their place was a new set of plans swirling around my head.

The upside of our mad search for the not-really-lost godwits was that we had discovered a new site where it seemed possible to catch godwits. Capture sites aren’t the easiest things to come by: They have to have a nice sandy or rocky beach along which we can place our cannon net; they need a consistent place where birds roost day after day, and they can’t have too many people. This new site, Teguen, seemed to have all of these things. It was quiet and well removed from the nearest road, had 200 yards of sandy beach that godwits and Whimbrels seemed to like, and at least for the moment, was home to about 1,200 godwits.

So instead of trying to push the birds at Pullao so soon after their return, we decided to give Teguen a try.  And, amazingly for our first time at a site, everything worked like a charm: With only a tiny bit of twinkling on our part, a sizeable group of godwits immediately positioned themselves right below our net and, within 15 minutes, we were weighing, banding, and releasing our first catch of nearly 100 godwits!

With the first godwit catch of the year under our belts, it was time to give Pullao a try. Luckily for us, the godwits stayed at Pullao another day and when we arrived there, we were greeted by more than 3,000 birds. That luck proved fickle though. Despite having all those birds in the bay, we were unable to coerce any of them to stand in front of our net long enough for us to say, “3, 2, 1, Fire!”

Afterward we all sat around and tried to puzzle out what had gone wrong. Had we started trying to twinkle the godwits too early? Had we put the net in the wrong place?  Were the birds in Pullao just too wary after their dispersal to other parts of the island and then their sudden return?

The answer remains unclear, but with only 86 godwits caught thus far, we are a long way from our stated goal of 300. I hope these last few days of the expedition will bring us a bit more luck and a lot more birds. Otherwise it will be a long year trying to figure out to how improve our chances next year.

Photo Quiz 6: Where Am I? Edition

In our last photo quiz just before the holidays, you all pretty seamlessly picked out both kinds of wigeons in the picture—nice work and a good example of the value of a long clear look at a bird. If only all sightings were the equivalent of a full-frame shot of birds frozen in motion!

This first quiz of the new year is a little grainy but it still shows you everything you need to make a fairly quick and confident identification. That’s why I’m going one step further and asking you to do a bit more detective work.

I took this photo on day 2 of my blissful holiday vacation. By knowing the names of the two organisms in the frame, you should be able to deduce where I spent my December vacation. Maybe not with GPS accuracy, but you can come up with a reasonably specific placename. I just love that about birding.

And for beginning birders, this is still a pretty good exercise for your field guide. This is another one of those odd-shaped birds that doesn’t look quite like its more widespread relatives. And it’s a great way to practice using the first two keys to identification, Size & Shape and Color Pattern. (Our free Inside Birding video series helps you practice this, too.)

So drop us a comment and let us know: What bird is this? What about it makes you say that? And where did I go over the holidays? Thanks for playing!

Like these photo quizzes? Check out Quiz 1, Quiz 2, Quiz 3, Quiz 4, and Quiz 5.

(Image: Hugh Powell)

Sound from the Field: Petrels on Volcanoes

Over the holidays, recordist Jon Erickson spent a couple of weeks on Round Island, a slanting, sun-baked slab of rock about 14 miles off the north coast of Mauritius. He recorded the island’s multitudes of Herald Petrels and Wedge-tailed Shearwaters, helped the island wardens with chores, and shared his meals with several stout lizards. Here’s the first of his stories:

This island looks like a volcanic cinder cone sliced in half, and fortunately, I didn’t have to arrive via the one somewhat terrifying landing rock that 19th-century explorer Nicolas Pike first wrote about. I came by helicopter along with a shipment of supplies. I was greeted by Tom, a Round Island warden, and Lucy, a young British student from Cardiff University who studies petrels.

After the noise of the departing helicopter had been replaced with the swirling birds above me, I felt the true remoteness of the island. But my apprehension melted before the almost ethereal scene: dozens of Herald Petrels chasing each other with their sublime, liquid, laughing calls.

Hear Jon’s recording of Herald Petrels from Round Island:

The birds mainly call in flight, and these are birds that really know how to fly.  Their three-dimensional aerobatics are mesmerizing. They use the wind currents blowing off the ocean to climb high into the air and then spin, roll, and yaw while they chase each other. The birds call primarily while chasing one another. The pursuer starts calling when it gets within a certain distance of the leader, and stops only when the leader extends his lead again. Swirling and arcing through the sky in unison, the birds look like World War II fighter planes dogfighting. And they are not afraid to make an occasional fly-by inspection of me as I try to keep their erratic flight patterns in the sights of the parabola microphone. Above all this commotion White-tailed and Red-tailed tropicbirds soar, their tail feathers trailing behind them like a kite.

Looking down I see dozens of large skinks around my feet. These are Telfair skinks, a species native only to Round Island (they have been introduced to Iles aux Aigrettes). During my stay I got to know them very well. I found dozens more as I brought my gear into the field house, a spot they are particularly fond of as it harbors a great deal more table scraps than anywhere else on the island. I soon found out they were after more than just table scraps, as one crawled up my back and jumped from my shoulder into the bowl of food I was eating.

On my first day helping Tom with daily island duties I got to experience my first “petrel search.” This entailed scrambling around on a steep rock slab looking for nesting petrels, catching them, and recording data:  incubating or not, dark- or light-morph plumage, band number, etc. If the bird has no band, Tom provides one for it. (The whole measuring procedure takes just a few minutes, after which the birds return to their nests.)

After a bit of training in which Tom warned me the birds can give a nasty nip, I gave a try at catching one. I awkwardly took hold of a large adult sitting on an egg and managed not to get bitten. We recorded its information and, following Tom’s advice, I prepared to launch the bird safely back into the air. But just as I began the toss, the bird struggled free and snapped at my thumb. After glancing off my thumbnail, the bird re-targeted and took off a good piece of skin. I shouted in pain while the bird flew away.

As I crawled into my tent at nightfall, the air filled with the sounds of hundreds of Wedge-tailed Shearwaters coming back to their nests. I’ll tell you that story for my next post.

(Images and sounds by Jon Erickson)

[A note on taxonomy: the Herald Petrel is a widely distributed seabird that nests on islands scattered about the Southern Hemisphere. Some authors regard the birds nesting on Round Island as a separate species, the Trindade Petrel. At the Cornell Lab we follow the Clements Checklist, which considers the birds on Round Island to be a subspecies of Herald Petrel, Pterodroma aminjoniana arminjoniana, and have used that name here. ]

Godwits Go Missing on Chiloé

Cornell graduate student Nate Senner has been writing from Chiloé Island, Chile, where he’s studying Hudsonian Godwits on their wintering grounds. He wrote yesterday with a puzzling situation on his hands:

Where have all the godwits gone?

A funny thing began to happen five days ago—the godwits began to disappear.

We first noticed that something was changing on January 15. Up till then, the number of godwits around seemed normal, if a bit unusually distributed around the island. For instance, Putemun, a large bay that in previous years held 2,000-3,000 godwits, had 800 this year. But Ten-Ten, which normally hosts around 200 godwits, had more than 2,000 this year. Totaling across all sites, all of the birds we expected seemed accounted for, so we were not particularly worried.

But last Friday our team went to Pullao, where we had been seeing around 4,000 godwits. On that day there were only 2,500 godwits. Then, as we waited for high tide so we could watch the birds go to their roosting sites (where they are easiest to catch), they started to leave the site entirely.

This had never happened before and so we all sat there wondering if it was something we had done. The next day, just to make sure it wasn’t our fault, we timed our return to Pullao right at the peak of high tide, when all of the birds should already have been roosting. But there were only 700 birds around.

As the tide began to fall again we moved to a nearby site, Putemun, thinking maybe the missing birds had gone there. Not only were Pullao’s birds not there, but fewer than a quarter of Putemun’s own birds remained. Where had all of the godwits gone?

In an attempt to get to the bottom of this mystery, I spent the next two days visiting as many sites near Pullao and Putemun as I could. The rest of the team has been catching the other species that we are interested in, Whimbrels, while I have been out sleuthing.

They’ve been lucky, but I haven’t. Two days ago I found about 500 godwits total at three sites—not nearly enough to match the several thousand missing birds. Yesterday I went to Aucar, Dalcahue, and then Pullao again, turning up a measly 75 godwits…. Where have all of the godwits gone?

Now the search is on and today the entire crew will spread out and visit every nook and cranny in the central part of Isla Chiloé to see if we can find our birds. We certainly don’t think that they are dead, but beyond that we have not ruled out any possibilities: Have they moved to a different part of Chiloé? Are they roosting on a secluded beach and returning to feed at their normal sites when we are not there?  Or have they left the island entirely? I don’t know, but I hope that we find out soon or else we are going to be out of luck on this expedition!

(Image: Godwit footprints on Chiloé Island, courtesy Nathan Senner)

Godwits and Scientists Rendezvous in Chile

Cornell Ph.D. student Nathan Senner is back on Chiloé Island, Chile, this month to study shorebirds he last saw in his home state of Alaska. As you may remember from stories he posted last year, he’s trying to learn how Hudsonian Godwits and Whimbrels survive their 8,000-mile migrations from the top of the world to the bottom and back again.

In his first few days back in Chile, Nate lost no time in reconnecting. Here’s Nate:

Old friends

Hello again! I’m back on Chiloé Island (see a map) to spend another month trekking around after Hudsonian Godwits. Last year’s expedition, with my colleague Jim Johnson (from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), was a big success. We captured some 250 godwits and 100 Whimbrels, and resighting those birds will give us valuable information on how well those birds survive their arduous yearly migrations.

For the last week Jim and I have spent 10 hours a day staring at the legs of shorebirds, and it’s been well worth it! By reading the birds’ leg bands we know exactly which birds have survived their latest migration, and we also learn which sites on the island are important for godwits—and therefore for conservation.

We’ve already resighted nearly 300 of the 600 godwits we’ve banded in past years here on Chiloé—and we’re hoping to get to 400. But what’s even more exciting has been finding five of the godwits that I banded just this past summer in Susitna Flats, Alaska (map).

It seems so remarkable to me that I journey for over 30 hours on planes and in cars to get here, only to find these same birds that I tromped around with for a whole summer. I last saw them on the complete other side of the globe, and now they’re here, casually feeding on clams and worms as if it were the most normal thing in the world to see me again. I can only hope that we will be able to catch one of them; it would sort of be like meeting up again with an old friend!

We will find out soon enough, though, whether we’ll have any luck capturing godwits. (We’ve set ourselves a goal of 300 godwits and 150 Whimbrels this year, to expand our study.) I’ll be sending updates about our work to this blog, so stay tuned!

(Images by Thomas B. Johnson. See more of his photos at his flickr page.)

Living Bird—New Issue Online!

How do you say Bar-tailed Godwit in Maori? That’s one of the first things you’ll learn in our cover story from Living Bird Autumn 2009—now free to read online. Don Stap’s article starts on a New Zealand mudflat and follows these graceful, 13-ounce shorebirds to the Arctic on the longest nonstop migration in the bird world.

Don’t miss Matthew Miller’s alarming feature about the dangers of bullet lead in game shot by hunters. Tiny bullet fragments splinter throughout carcasses, causing health problems for raptors like the California Condor and Bald Eagle. The lead can be dangerous for people, too, if they eat contaminated meat without knowing it. As someone who has enjoyed his share of venison dinners, I see it as another great argument for lead-free ammunition.

Elsewhere, Marie Read photographs a bowerbird that’s fairly luminescent, and Jack Connor seeks his ecology merit badge. Mel White gets dragged around the world by a strange, bare-headed Bornean bird, and Pete Dunne has a talk with his psychiatrist. And we feature your letters about the pros and cons of one of the most divisive articles we’ve ever published.

Lab members should be receiving their Winter 2010 copies of Living Bird in a couple of weeks. I’ve said it before, but I’ll just mention again for new readers how important—and easy—it is to join the Lab (watch the video). We’re a nonprofit organization that gets less than 1% of our funding from Cornell University. Memberships are a major part of the funding that we depend upon to keep going.

Thanks to everyone who supports us. Enjoy the new issue—and Happy New Year!

(Image: Bar-tailed Godwit by Ted Swem)