1. Let’s start by checking out this eBird data for September from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology: In September 2022, 84,509 eBirders worldwide contributed more than 1,191690 checklists of birds through eBird.org and eBird Mobile. The total number of eBird observations is over 1,291,156,212. You can stay tuned with the current number of species, checklists, and users on eBird's homepage. Monthly eBird Pro Tip: Go birding and submit eBird checklists on October Big Day—this Saturday, 8 October! Create an eBird Trip Report for October 8 to summarize the places you visited and the birds you found on October's biggest day in birding. Share your stories on social media with #OctoberBigDay. (via Living Bird)
2. Continuing theme for BNI – “Lights out, America!”: One morning last fall, during the height of the songbird migration, I opened my door to the glorious autumn light and saw a yellow-rumped warbler lying on my front stoop. I knew it was dead before I opened the storm door. A living warbler does not lie with its elegant passerine toes curled into a tiny cage of tiny bones holding nothing. Yellow-rumped warblers don’t breed in Middle Tennessee. This one was migrating to its wintering grounds, either here or farther south. Migrating birds are vulnerable to many hazards: predators, extreme weather, insufficient food and insufficient water. Glass is particularly treacherous. Expanses of glass — windows without mullions, storm doors, skyscrapers — are the worst. (via The New York Times)
3. And then this from Manomet about the power of technology to unlock the mysteries of migration: In late May 2022, a team from Manomet and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service returned to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to continue their collaborative work studying Arctic nesting shorebirds. This year, they worked on several research projects including coastal plain shorebird surveys, a study of shorebird nest survival, remote audio monitoring of nesting birds, and a multi-year tracking study of nesting Whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus). In addition to this Arctic research, they are conducting a long-term study of juvenile Whimbrel migration and survival based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Manomet also recently began monitoring Whimbrel on the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana, a newly-discovered area of importance for these birds as they migrate to their Arctic breeding grounds from Central and South America. (via Manomet)
4. How Flamingos survive a hurricane: As Hurricane Ian hit southwest Florida on Wednesday, images of devastation dominated television news reports and social media streams. But one image, taken from a St. Petersburg botanical garden, was striking for a different reason. It showed about a dozen cotton-candy pink flamingos huddled in a public bathroom — a stark contrast to the images of Florida’s washed-out bridges, roofless homes and flooded roadways. The birds were schlepped into the bathroom because Ian, forecast to become a major storm, was expected to cause catastrophic damage in the Tampa Bay area surrounding Sunken Gardens, which is home to a variety of birds and other animals. (via The Washington Post)
5. Dredged for gold: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintains access to all of our country’s waterways, ports, and harbors. Since 1998, the Army Corps has dredged almost 1.3 billion cubic yards of sediment along the Atlantic coast to address coastal erosion and deposition processes and keep navigation open for boats and barges and commerce in general. That amount of sediment is enough to pave 57,000 miles of four-lane highway that could circle the earth’s equator more than two times, says Mike Molnar, director of Manomet’s Coastal Zone Initiative. Most of the dredged materials are typically hauled out to the open ocean and dumped, which until now has been the most cost effective option for the Army Corps. Molnar sees that material as gold, though. He says there are opportunities to use those sediments for beneficial use: specifically, to augment and build new shorebird habitat along Atlantic coastlines and waterways, a key part of the Atlantic flyway shorebirds travel along during their yearly migrations. (via Manomet)
6. A different kind of island for shorebirds: A new tool to conserve endangered waterbird populations in Maryland’s Coastal Bays has proven to be a smash hit. A floating manmade “island” built with a wood frame, the first of its kind in the region, was deployed last year as a shared project of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Audubon Mid-Atlantic, and Maryland Coastal Bays Program. Its purpose? To provide a nesting site for three of Maryland’s state-listed endangered waterbirds: the common tern, royal tern and black skimmer. The wooden island mimics the sand flats on which the birds would lay their eggs. The structure holds features including crushed clamshells as substrate, wooden chick shelters, and even decoy birds to attract nesters. (via Chesapeake Bay Magazine)
7. Age old conflict: Housing vs. Birds: An expansive area of untapped wetland in Hong Kong may be coming under threat, as developers desperate for land plan to build tall apartments near the protected area. The development could ease the city’s affordable housing crisis, but conservationists say the wetland is critical to both the region’s biodiversity — it provides foraging and roosting grounds for hundreds of bird species — and its fight against climate change. By one estimate, the city’s most exposed areas can expect disastrous storm surges once a decade by the 2050s. Any proposed building earmarked within the wetland’s zone must come with an environmental assessment, but real estate firms are testing those limits. (via Bloomberg)
8. Unusual birds, outsized risks?: Birds with unusual bills, extreme size (big or small), and specialized survival strategies are most threatened by the global extinction crisis. According to a study published in July in the journal Current Biology, the most superlative birds with the most extraordinary lifestyles—such as the Red-headed Vulture, Giant Ibis, Bengal Florican, and Seychelles Scops- Owl—face the greatest risks in this age of climate change and habitat loss. Their disappearance would lead to a “homogenization” of the world’s bird life, the study authors say. According to lead author Emma Hughes, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield in England, the loss of the world’s weirdest birds would mean a loss for the world at large. (via Living Bird)
9. Hope this is true: When Danielle Belleny discovered the flute in middle school, she was hooked. “I absolutely fell in love with learning those études as a high schooler,” say Belleny of the work of classical composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert. As an adult, the Texas-based wildlife biologist prides herself on her ability to recognise birdsong. And a new study is showing that her childhood expertise in human music might have made her ability to become a bird-watching expert much easier. A recent study found that the brain skills that expert bird-watchers use—like attention to certain types of features or markings—help them retain similar but new information (like quickly learning about a bird they haven’t seen before). (via National Geographic)
10. “…a bird’s dishonesty”: About five years ago, Clinton Francis and a gaggle of ornithology students were walking toward the ocean at San Simeon Beach State Park in California when they noticed a type of plover called a killdeer about 60 feet away, calling Dee! Dee! Dee! They hadn’t seen the shorebird flush from its ground nest, but Francis says that it would have crept slyly away from its eggs after registering the herd of humans as potential predators. Now that it had an audience, the killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) began to lie through its beak. It contorted its wings in what’s called the broken-wing display, feigning an injury that would make it seem unable to fly. Francis was already familiar with this sort of bird theater, typically performed for earthbound diurnal predators in the hopes that, instead of finding the killdeer’s nest, they’d see a plump, apparently wounded parent as an easy meal. (via The Scientist)
11. Travel tip (spoiler alert: long way from where you are right now): Seychelles’ endemic and other resident birds can be seen all year-round. Some seabirds are also present year-round though most terns breed during the south-east monsoon. That said, to maximize birdwatching opportunities and the number of species seen, a trip might be planned either around activities in the breeding colonies or the likelihood of seeing migrant species. Migrants and vagrants are most likely at times of passage between Eurasian breeding grounds and wintering grounds mainly in Africa. (via Travelweek)
12. Finally, “foundational works”, an interesting piece on Margaret Morse Nice (1883-1974): When you headed out into the field as a 19th century ornithologist, you had one of two things in mind as to what constituted your profession: (1) to look for birds and add them to your regional list, or (2) to perhaps capture and kill some of those birds to study their physical properties later for taxonomic purposes. You wanted to know where different birds were, and what they looked like, but as to what they did with their lives, and why they did it, those were either questions of profound indifference, or ones so seemingly difficult to approach that it was a cavernous waste of time and effort to try. Though many in the early Twentieth Century contributed to the reversal of this static conception of the study of bird life, there isn’t much doubt about who the most significant figure was in bringing behavioral studies into American fieldwork – Margaret Morse Nice (1883-1974). (via Women You Should Know)
Bird Photo of the Week
Photo by Hap Ellis, Fall: A young Bald Eagle, Kennebunkport, ME.
Bird Videos of the Week
By Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “Hope and Restoration: Saving the Whitebark Pine”.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Two friends.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Swinging Feeder.