Birds

Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle

Many birds nest in May in the Northern Hemisphere, so it’s a good time for webcams. Here are five that provided great viewing on May 7, 2008:

Peregrine Falcons (Hamilton Community Peregrine Project):

A pair of Peregrine Falcons, dubbed Madame X and Surge, are nesting on the Sheraton Hamilton Hotel in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Both birds are banded and some of their history is known (the information on the page is worth reading). Monitors have been watching them since early March and the webcam, which refreshes every ten seconds, provides a clear view of the scrape. The first egg hatched on May 6.

Bald Eagles (Xcel Energy): This streaming video webcam looks straight down into a Bald Eagle nest in Platteville Colorado, US. There are three nestlings (two is the norm) and it’s easy to see them moving about as the adults come and go.

Great Blue Heron (Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Kids in the Nest, and Olympia Systems): My personal favorite from April’s webcams, this streaming video cam is superb. The three chicks are active and growing fast.

Barn Owls (Wirral’s Barn Owl Webcam): This site provides four views of a Barn Owl nest in Wirral Country Park, UK. The pictures refresh every five minutes. (Hint: the four cam views open in separate windows so you can have them all open at once to see the present scene from all perspectives.) For past views, click the “Diary of a Barn Owl” link.

A Birdfeeder in Oklahoma (Pat’s Backyard Bird Cam): Watch feeder birds in Oklahoma City. There are two cameras which refresh every 15 – 20 seconds and at certain times of day there’s lots of activity. Click on the “Bird Visitors” link for pictures of birds you’re likely to see.

Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle

Many waterbirds migrate north from Africa and Southern Asia each spring to breed. In the fall, they make the return trip. During each migration, they rely on wetlands along the route to provide them with resting, feeding, and roosting sites. Sadly, these wetlands are disappearing as humans drain them, pollute them, or build on them. The fact that migratory birds must pass through a number of countries makes conservation of this dwindling habitat difficult—it requires international cooperation.

The Wings Over Wetlands Project (WOW) is an attempt to address this difficulty. WOW is an international partnership of conservation organizations and governments designed to help countries get the information they need, and then work cooperatively to conserve important wetlands (and with them, the world’s waterbirds). The area covered by WOW includes Africa, Europe, much of Asia, Greenland, and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

The WOW project has just launched its website, a site designed to provide information about the project, critical wetlands, and the birds involved. In the future, the site will link to tools such as the ‘Critical Sites Network Tool,’ which will link wetlands with the bird species that use them to help conservation groups determine the importance of specific wetlands.

Related Content:

Vacation With Cranes in Hungary

Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle

In a recent article in the New York Times, (Did Your Shopping List Kill a Songbird? Opinion, Mar 30, 2008) Bridget Stutchbury discusses the impact of extensive pesticide use in Central and South America on migratory birds. It seems that birds returning to the south for the winter are dying in vast numbers from pesticide poisoning. Many of the pesticides that are being used in large quantities in the south have been banned or restricted in the north due to their toxicity.

People in North America and Europe are increasingly aware of threats to bird species, whether it be chemicals, destruction of wetlands or other habitat, wind farm development, fishing practices, even feral cats. Concern and conservation have become more intense since National Audubon revealed that many common North American birds are in precipitous decline.

It’s ironic, then, that even as we become more aware at home, we fuel the decline of birds in the south with our hunger for imported produce. Those pesticides we’re not using are being used to produce our food anyway—they’re just being used somewhere else. To help the birds and our own health, Stutchbury suggests that we should avoid buying the following produce from Central and South America if it has not been organically grown: coffee, bananas, melons, strawberries, green beans, bell peppers, and tomatoes.

Bridget Stutchbury is the author of Silence of the Songbirds (Harper Collins, 2007).

Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle

Every day we hear about bird species in decline and new threats to birds around the world. In 2007 BirdLife International launched BirdLife Species Champions, a project to save the world’s critically endangered birds—all 189 of them. Now, BirdLife brings us the Rare Birds Yearbook, a book about the 189 threatened species and some of the efforts that are being made to save them from extinction.

The Rare Birds Yearbook is mostly about the birds themselves: species names, ranges, populations, threats, past conservation attempts and actions for the future. There are photographs and illustrations of the birds to complement the data. However, the yearbook also makes interesting reading because it contains articles about species with interesting backgrounds, some of the conservation projects already underway, and the people involved.

Birds face numerous threats: habitat destruction by industry and development; recreational incursions into wilderness; introduced predators such as cats, rats, and snakes; fishing practices; egg collecting; hunting; extreme weather; and global warming to name a few. This list makes it clear that humans bear much of the responsibility for the dwindling birds of the world.

Some humans are working hard to help our beleaguered birds, and publications like the Rare Birds Yearbook not only provide education but also directly help the effort: for every purchase, £4 goes to support BirdLife Species Champions. Find out more about the book from BirdLife International.

Birds on List of 189 Critically Endangered Species:

Kakapo, Strigops habroptila

Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Campephilus principalis

California Condor, Gymnogyps californianus

Cozumel Thrasher, Toxostoma guttatum

Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle

More and more people are setting up webcams so bird watchers can watch birds in the nest and at busy birdfeeders. Here are five webcams that were all working when I checked them on April 8, 2008, and worth looking at (Remember to account for time differences when you want to watch!).

Lake Washington Eagle Cam (WildWatchCams): A Bald Eagle is sitting on this enormous nest of twigs and branches. The picture refreshes every ten seconds so it’s interesting to watch. The only difficulty is that the bird is usually sitting partly hidden behind the trunk of a tree.

Blackwater Refuge Live Osprey Cam: I don’t think osprey are actually nesting on this platform yet but they are coming and going. The nest is in Cambridge, Maryland.

Burrowing Owl Cam (WildWatchCams): The Burrowing Owls seem to spend most of their time outside near the burrow entrance, though they are not very active. The picture updates every ten seconds.

Great Blue Heron Cam (Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Kids in the Nest, and Olympia Systems): The heron is sitting. This is a streaming cam - you can see the bird moving around and watch its feathers being ruffled by the breeze.

Wildlife Focus Web Cam in the Forest (The World Land Trust): Set in Buenaventura Reserve, Ecuador, this is recorded streaming video. On April 8 the video showed many beautiful hummingbirds drinking from a water dish.

Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle

Canada’s 1.3 billion acres of boreal forest stretches all the way across the country and includes forests, wetlands, and northern tundra. It’s home to many species of plants and animals that rely on it for everything, and is the home and/or breeding range of literally hundreds of species of birds. Warblers and many other songbirds, shorebirds, ducks, geese, swans and countless other species nest and raise young there every year.



People use Canada’s boreal forest as well—and most don’t use it sustainably. Millions of acres are destroyed each year for lumber harvest, mining, hydroelectric projects, and gas and oil exploration. Only a tiny 8% of this vital ecosystem is protected, while almost a third is earmarked for development. Eight percent is not nearly enough if we want the species that rely on the boreal to survive.



SaveOurBorealBirds.org, a group of at least 17 environmental and bird conservation groups from both North and South America, is asking for everyone’s help to save the boreal forest. You can read more about the boreal forest ecosystem and the many birds that depend on it at their website, and sign the petition (directed at Canadian government) to protect the ecosystem before it’s too late.

Related content:



Common Birds are Declining

What is a Ramsar Wetland?

Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle

For the past few days, I’ve observed a pair of nuthatches showing considerable interest in one of my nesting boxes. I’m delighted: I hung the box in the fall of 2006, and to my knowledge no bird has given it a passing glance, let alone looked inside, until now. I’m also worried: we have red squirrels and they have certainly checked out the box, travelling through the tree at regular intervals. I’ve read, however, that nuthatches have ways of dealing with squirrels , so I’ll wait to see what happens.

The interest shown by the nuthatches does seem to confirm some nesting box wisdom. First, a nesting box may need to weather a bit and become part of the landscape before birds will use it. Second, attention to design and location pays off. Third, a nesting box may well attract a bird species it wasn’t originally meant for (I was aiming for chickadees). And finally, by the time spring is officially here, nesting boxes should be ready outside, even if the temperature is still below zero and there’s snow in the forecast.

Interested in encouraging birds to nest on your property? Here are some articles that might be of interest:

Create Natural Nesting Sites

Build Mourning Dove Nest Baskets

Hang a Bluebird Nesting Box

Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle

Have you ever seen a bird living in the wild that obviously doesn’t belong? Seeing Mynahs in the trees in Florida or peacocks strolling around in California is a reminder that birds raised in captivity can escape and survive in new places, at least for a while. In the worst case scenario, escaped cage birds do well in the wild in new places, establishing a breeding population and becoming invasive threats to native species.



In colonial times, people sometimes deliberately released cage birds in new places: this is how European Starlings and House Sparrows came to thrive in North America in such great numbers—displacing native birds from territory, food supplies, and nesting sites. Other birds, such as mynahs and peafowl may have escaped from captivity by accident or been deliberately released by owners who no longer wanted them. Then there are the popular pet birds like parrots and canaries that sometimes escape and usually perish.



Today we know it’s rarely a good idea environmentally to deliberately introduce a species where it doesn’t belong. In the case of a pet bird, it’s abusive to the animal as well, since we can never be certain that the bird will be able to find food, endure the climate, and evade unfamiliar predators. Bird owners should always be extra vigilant to ensure that birds don’t ever escape from cages and enclosures.



Two rules to follow: never remove a bird from its native habitat, and never release a bird into the wild where it doesn’t belong. Simple.

Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle

A new field guide to the birds of Chile was published in 2003, including 473 species known to live in the country or visit there (Birds of Chile: Princeton Field Guides. Alvaro Jaramillo. Princeton University Press, 2003).

One reason that Chile is home to so many bird species is its wide variety of habitats: sea coasts, offshore islands, mountains, desert, forest etc. There is not just a wide range in elevation in Chilean environments; the long thin shape of the country means a wide range in latitude as well. It means hundreds of different bird species suited to many different ecosystems—cotingas in the north, pelicans along the coast, and albatrosses offshore.

I’ll be visiting some of these ecosystems and I hope to see a lot of birds I never seen before. You can see some of the possibilities in another birder’s photoset. Check out the collection of silhouettes of a Giant Hummingbird. Hummingbirds are one of the things you have to visit South America to really see: a few species migrate into North America each summer, and although these are much appreciated, the vast majority of beautiful hummingbird species remain in the south throughout the year.

Another fascinating South American species is the Burrowing Parrot, seen in another photoset by the same birder. These birds, once extremely numerous in Patagonia are becoming increasingly rare and may be threatened with extinction if population decreases continue.

Here’s to seeing lots of Chilean birds. Enjoy the Birds page on Suite101 while I’m away.

Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle

Malta is an important location for migrating birds, visited by species from dozens of European countries. This is important because, despite its membership in the European Union, Malta breaks EU laws every year by allowing hunters to take migratory birds in the spring.



Spring is a particularly damaging time to hunt birds because they are on their way to their breeding territory. A bird that is hunted in spring has no opportunity to reproduce that year; a bird that is taken in the fall may well leave offspring who will reproduce in later years. Each year, there is an outcry against spring hunting in Malta—but the hunting continues.



Now the fight is heating up. The European Commission has announced that it will take Malta to the European Court of Justice to force an end to the spring hunt. Meanwhile, though the vast majority of Maltese are thought to fully support an end to the hunt, a small minority are willing to go to surprising lengths to illustrate their opposition: in the past vandals have destroyed trees at nature reserves, and now three cars belonging to BirdLife Malta volunteers have been torched and destroyed.



The mindset of these criminals is beyond me. I couldn’t shoot a bird, let alone shoot one illegally, or set fire someone’s car because they say I can’t shoot one. It looks like pure selfishness is way ahead of common sense here. It’s scary to think these individuals have firearms as well as fire.



What do you think of the situation in Malta? Start a discussion.