1. Let’s start with a great New Yorker piece on the American Flamingos that surprisingly appeared in the midwest earlier this Fall: Andrew Farnsworth, a senior research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, helped to explain the hurricane-flamingo connection. As a five-year-old, Farnsworth became fascinated by the movements of birds; when he started work as a researcher, he discovered historical records of epic avian journeys. In the late eighteen-hundreds, trade winds carried the cattle egret nearly two thousand miles from Africa to South America. Later, egrets expanded their territory and migrated to Florida, where they nest to this day. Sometimes, sudden rain or headwinds force migrating birds to settle in the closest available habitat. Mid-century biologists even had a term for this: the birds were said to “fall out.” “They drop into the nearest habitat they can find,” Farnsworth told me. “The combination of hurricane alley plus the trades can be a conveyor belt.”
To figure out why recent hurricanes seem to have carried so many flamingos into Florida, Farnsworth said, scientists might consider what made them take flight in the first place. Perhaps stormwater flooded their habitat, or high water temperatures threatened their source of food. “Thinking about the potential stress and then the vehicle to get them moving—that starts to tell the story of what’s going on,” he told me. (via The New Yorker)
2. Cicadas, caterpillars and ripple effects: When huge broods of cicadas emerge after years underground, they provide an all-you-can-eat buffet for birds. And Brood X—the group that swarmed the Eastern United States in 2021—brought as many as 1.5 million of the protein-rich insects per acre. These mass cicada emergences have cascading effects on the broader ecosystem. Researchers found that birds, faced with a sudden abundance of food when Brood X emerged, ate fewer caterpillars. In turn, the insects flourished, munching their way through oak forests. (via Smithsonian Magazine)
3. The Sedge Wren is back – but you’d never guess where: More than 60% of all grassland habitats in North America have been lost, according to the 2019 North American Grassland and Birds Report by the National Audubon Society. Much of it is due to agricultural conversion and other human development, it said. In the largest swath of major grasslands left, the Great Plains — stretching from Alberta and eastern Montana down through the central US — less than 2% of the remaining habitat there is strictly protected and by federal agencies as of 2016, one analysis found. When grasslands disappear or get drained, the birds vanish too, as happened in New York City. But the sedge wrens, listed as threatened in the state of New York, are back in Freshkills Park on Staten Island. We set out in September to catch a glimpse of the mysterious bird, wandering through the rolling hills, led by José Ramírez-Garofalo, the park manager for science and research development. (via CNN)
4. One sad, sad song: A mournful call from the last living Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird in the 1980s has resurfaced following a depressing announcement from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Last Monday, the FWS announced that 21 species had been delisted from the Endangered Species Act (ESA) because of extinction. One of the delisted species was the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird, which likely went extinct in 1987, 20 years after it was added to the ESA. Ornithologist H. Douglas Pratt captured a recording of one of the last-known calls from the bird that is now stored at Cornell University's department of ornithology. The recording is one of the last known ʻōʻō bird callings. Pratt described the song as a "very loud whistling call" in a 2019 report by technology blog Engadget. (via Newsweek)
5. A river of raptors (every Fall): Every year around five million hawks, eagles, kites and other birds of prey from Canada and the USA quite literally take off for warmer climes to the south – and all of them pass through a long, narrow corridor in the state of Veracruz, between the Sierra Madre Oriental and the Gulf of Mexico. It took a Mexican organization named Pronatura 32 years to discover and verify this. The group now has find an ideal spot for observing and counting one of the most spectacular annual migrations in the world. If you visit Pronatura’s observatory in Veracruz, you can see “clouds” of hawks, kites, ospreys, turkey vultures, and many other birds through most of September, October, and November. (via Mexico Daily News)
6. 191 countries, 36,000 people, 83,735 checklists…Global Big Day October 14th: On 14 October, people in 191 countries around the world joined together to celebrate birds for October Big Day. More than 36,000 people contributed 83,735 checklists, setting three new records for the single biggest day in October birding history. E.J. McAdams, Chief Development Officer at BirdLife International and Executive Director of Friends of BirdLife International in the United States, said: “Global Bird Weekend is not just a celebration of birds, it’s a call to action. By participating in this event and contributing to our fundraising efforts, people are actively shaping the future of birds and their habitats”. (via BirdLife)
7. "Fundamentally, this is about whether nestlings survive or not”: Millions of young birds die from extreme heat in farm fields across America in what researchers say is a growing threat from climate change that could affect avian populations. The nestlings and chicks often perish from dehydration and the affects of thermoregulation, especially when they fledge in "open cup" nests and bird boxes located in unshaded fields, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis. Their survival also depends on the ability of mating adults to forage for food and support the nest, both of which can be impeded by extreme temperatures. (via Scientific American)
8. “All Hallows Eve is upon us”: Though we’re back to short-sleeve weather and barely a leaf has reached the ground, I assure you it is indeed late October, which means that All Hallows Eve is upon us. Somehow, in my years of filing these reports, I’ve never touched on the spooky birds of horror: crows, ravens, and owls. But it’s time for those official birds of Halloween to shine, or more appropriately, to scare. We have three species of large, black corvid around here – the familiar American Crow, the lesser known Fish Crow, and the recently arrived Common Raven. Of these, the Fish Crow can be dismissed for Halloween given its less than scary, nasal, Fran Drescher-esque call. But regular American crows and ravens are in full demand at this creepiest time of the year. (via NPR for the CAI)
9. Here’s a good article in Yale Environment 360 on cities searching for solutions to bird kills like we saw in Chicago: Most early mornings in the spring and fall, as he has done for more than four decades, David Willard goes out to gather the dead. A retired curator of birds at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, Willard walks the mile from his office, in the dark, to pick up the thrushes, warblers, sparrows, and other migrating birds that have met their end against the glass walls of McCormick Place, a giant modernist rectangle on the Lake Michigan shore. The dead birds go into a plastic grocery bag. Those that are stunned but still alive he slips into a paper sandwich bag, to be released later in the brush on a nearby hill. Originally built in 1960 in a city park, McCormick Place is the largest convention center in North America. Thanks to the diligence of Willard and his colleagues, it has also earned a wide reputation as a killer of birds. (via Yale Environment 360)
10. More fallout from the McCormick Place bird strikes – Michigan DNR seeks to raise awareness: The Michigan Department of Natural Resources is raising awareness after nearly a thousand birds, including warblers migrating through Michigan, died after crashing into a building in Chicago. The incident occurred earlier this month when the migratory songbirds on their way to Central America for the winter crashed into a convention center along Lake Michigan. And while the DNR says collision events that large are rare, bird collisions are not. In fact, they are a leading cause of bird mortality, with up to a billion such deaths yearly in the U.S. alone. And Michigan is at the center since it lies at the intersection of the Mississippi River and Atlantic flyways, migration routes that bring over 350 bird species through the state each year, with fall migration peaking in October. (via Michigan Live)
11. What does electrifying plastic beads in a laboratory help you understand?: Electrifying plastic beads in a laboratory setup creates flocking behavior similar to that observed in birds. And if you mix beads of two sizes, they will automatically separate. This seemingly simple observation by Alexandre Morin and Samadarshi Maity teaches us about collective motion at all scales. "It's beautiful that something as complex as birds can be understood at its essence through beads." A single bird can fly in any direction it wants. But a group of birds moves in the same direction as if they are one without following a leader: they flock. This spontaneous flocking is the phenomenon that Morin studies, though not by observing animals. Instead, he uses plastic microbeads. (via Phys Org)
12. Pays to be smart if you live in the city: Australian magpies have made themselves at home in human cities, but that doesn’t mean that urban environments are free of challenges. New research suggests that human noise pollution affects the songbirds’ ability to forage for food, communicate, and respond to alarm calls—but smart birds are better able to cope with this noise. Most of the research on the effects of noise on wild animals has looked at how a population or species is affected. However, individual differences may enable some animals to cope better than others. (via Psychology Today)
13. More on the concerning bird flu news we’ve noted from Antartica: The lethal form of bird flu that has been killing millions of wild birds around the world has spread south to the Antarctic region, where it is feared it will have a devastating impact on seals and whales as well as birds such as penguins and albatrosses. It could even lead to extinctions. “There are species on some of the Antarctic islands and sub-Antarctic islands that are unique to those islands, and only occur in small numbers, in hundreds or thousands,” says Thijs Kuiken at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. “If the virus reaches those populations, they are in threat of extinction.” (via New Scientist)
14. Another Audubon chapter drops its namesake: The Chicago Audubon Society will soon become the Chicago Bird Alliance. Leaders of the bird conservation organization decided to adopt a new name after grappling with the legacy of John James Audubon, the namesake of Audubon societies even though he wasn’t their founder. Audubon was a well-known early American birdwatcher and a wildlife artist during the 1800s who created “The Birds of America,” a collection of 435 life-size prints of various bird species. He also was a slave owner who opposed emancipation and was accused of academic fraud and plagiarism, stealing human remains and sending human skulls to “a colleague who used them to assert that whites were superior to non-whites,” according to the National Audubon Society. Two other bird groups in the Midwest also are changing their names. The Detroit Audubon and Madison Audubon will become the Detroit Bird Alliance and Badgerland Bird Alliance. (via Chicago Sun Times)
15. And then there’s the tenth annual Aussie Backyard Bird Count: This year is the tenth annual Aussie Backyard Bird Count, which Professor Simon Griffith says highlights the important role citizen science projects play in our understanding of changes taking place in our world. The project is Australia's largest single citizen science event, with organizers BirdLife Australia inviting people across the country to spend 20 minutes in their backyard, local park or on their balcony noting down the birds they see. Last year, more than 77,000 people submitted a checklist of the birds they spotted, a huge increase from the 9,000 or so collected when it began in 2014. (via Phys Org)
16. Look who’s using birding “experiences” to boost sales: I've said it before, and I will say it again: birds are cool. The older I get, the more I notice, appreciate, and want to identify birds. On a very related note, did you know that in addition to sharing places to stay, Airbnb offers "experiences", kind of like excursions? Being on the Seacoast allows for a variety of experiences in both ocean and mountain form. Two experiences I have noticed recently are bird-watching excursions. And this does make sense. There are TONS of birds that are native to the Seacoast and rely on the ocean/marshes for their food, populating needs, etc. The Coastal New Hampshire Birdwatching is available for two hours of bird-watching at Odiorne Point State Park, a very popular birding destination. (via WOKQ 97.5)
17. And finally, it is Project FeederWatch time again – and you don’t even need a feeder!: Join the 37th Season of Project FeederWatch.
Bird Videos of the Week
By Vice News, “We Asked a NYC Pigeon Man…Why?”
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Dark-eyed Juncos.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Hummingbirds.