Birder's World Field of View

The Sibley iPhone app: An interview with David Allen Sibley

Matt Mendenhall — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:45:00 GMT

Contributing Editor David Sibley (right), author of the groundbreaking Sibley Guide to Birds, has been busy lately. Last fall, he published his Sibley Guide to Trees, which explains what to look for to identify 668 native and commonly cultivated trees in North America. In an interview with Editor Chuck Hagner, he described it as a “tree guide for birdwatchers.”

Last week, Sibley released a version of the Guide to Birds for the iPhone. Called The Sibley eGuide to the Birds of North America, it presents all 6,600 illustrations in the Guide to Birds, as well as maps, text from the field guide, and more than 2,200 recordings of songs, calls, and other vocalizations.

If you have iTunes on your computer, here’s how to find The Sibley eGuide on the App Store.

Yesterday, I spoke with Sibley about the app and the pros and cons of electronic field guides. We started, though, by talking about Thailand. He had just returned from a trip to the country in search of the critically endangered Spoon-billed Sandpiper. --Matt Mendenhall, Associate Editor

How was your trip to Thailand?

It was great. I’m still working my way through my notes and photos. I’ve already put up a couple posts about the Spoon-billed Sandpiper on my website, and I have a few more to write. I spent eight days at the main Spoon-billed Sandpiper site and saw birds every day. [See David's Google map of the area.] Some days just two or three birds. And they move around a lot, so it wasn’t like you could just sit down and watch them for four hours at a stretch. You’d work your way out through the salt ponds until you found one (usually they were in the same place early each morning or within a few hundred yards of the same spot), then watch for as long as they stayed, which might be anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. And then they’d fly off to another pond, and you just hope that you’re looking at them when they fly, follow where they go, and track them down again.

But even if I missed them when they’re flying, I was always able to wander around and find another one somewhere within an hour. I learned a lot. It’s a really interesting bird. I saw six together a couple of times. I suspect there were more. They moved around so much, and it was so hard just to find more than two together. There’s a good chance that the six at once I saw a couple of times was probably not the total number using the area. But that’s just a hunch. If it’s more than that, it’s not much more.

The way they moved around, I kept thinking that some day I’d follow one on its flight and walk over to a pond and find 12 sitting together. But I never did. And I never did find any sort of gathering place for them. They were so individual in their movements; they never really flocked.

Were you there with an expedition to search for them, or how did the trip come about?

I just wanted to go. I wanted to go last winter, and I was wrapped up in work on the tree guide. So I was determined to go this winter, and I just blocked out some days on the calendar and said I’m going. Will Russell went with me. [Russell is founder and former managing director of WINGS Birding Tours, for which Sibley led tours for several years.] We met in Bangkok, and he stayed for most of the time.

The first few days we had a guide, a Thai birder who was helping us get our footing. It was my first trip to Asia, so it was really, really different, so foreign, and it was good to have some help for the first few days. But after that, it was fairly simple. We were just going back to the same place every day and exploring the salt ponds.

Wow, it sounds fantastic.

Yeah, it was. There’s so many shorebirds. Almost every single bird that you look at is a species that’s interesting from a North American perspective. Huge flocks of Marsh Sandpipers and Curlew Sandpipers and Greater Sand-Plovers and Red-necked Stints. Keep searching and you’d find lots of Lesser Sand-Plovers and a few Long-toed Stints, a few Little Stints, a few Temminck’s Stints, a few Broad-billed Sandpipers, and lots of other species.

I commented to Will at one point, when we’d been watching birds on one pond for an hour or so and we’d seen like 300 Black-tailed Godwits and 20 Ruffs and 100 Marsh Sandpipers and a smattering of other things: “Imagine discovering that pond in California.” [Laughs]

You’d have every birder in America showing up at that pond.

Yeah, it was really fun.

As much as I’d like to hear more about Thailand, I should probably move on to the app. So how did it get started?

I’ve always had an interest in it, and my publisher has always had an interest in it. This started maybe four years ago, before anybody had heard of an iPhone. The developers who worked on it were working on a version of it for Pocket PC. We got pretty well along on that, but the market for it looked like it kept shrinking. And the really powerful Pocket PCs that would be able to run a program like this were disappearing and being replaced by smartphones. So after a couple years of that, the iPhone came along. And after a short time, it was pretty obvious that that was the platform to work on.

And the developers were able to translate most of what we had done on the early work -- just convert it pretty straightforwardly into an iPhone app. So it’s been a long, long time in development. Probably if we were starting now from scratch on an iPhone app, we would design something different, but a lot of what we have in this app was developed as a general pocket-computer idea.

I’m sure we’ll be working on it more in the months and years to come, and improving it and taking advantage of the new things that come along and the things that the iPhone offers.

Were you involved a lot in developing it over these last few years?

Yeah, I was.

How so?

You know I was very involved in the design of my books. You have a collection of images and a collection of text. That’s important, and that’s the heart of the book or the product. But the way it’s arranged is really critical. And when you move things around on the page in a book, it changes their meaning or changes the emphasis a little bit. So I spent a lot of time on the books working on exactly where to put the little captions around the images, which image to use to point out different field marks.

But in the book you can look at that and see all of it at once. You see all the images of two or four species at once. And you can take it all in, and your mind makes allowances for all the variations, all the plumages in between. And you can read a caption that’s attached to one image and apply it to all the images because you’re seeing them all at the same time. And none of that’s possible on an iPhone or any little tiny screen on a computer.

So it really took a lot of thought to figure out how to best present the information, and for me it ended it in a lot of frustration, really. There’s really no way to match the experience of the book on a little tiny iPhone screen. But I wanted the navigation through the program to be simple and logical and to recreate the book experience as much as we could on the iPhone. So all of the ways the user interacts with the program are things that I was very involved with.

Yeah, there’s a difference between the way you use a printed field guide and an electronic field guide.

Yeah, one example is the maps. Everybody who wants an electronic field guide like this, the first place they go is, “Oh, it can search by location and by date and help me find the species I’m looking for.” But if you just take the maps that are in the field guide, and have the computer create a database that says this pixel on the map represents this 50-mile square block, we’re going to record the species as a summer visitor there because it’s colored red on the map. But the next pixel over is not colored so the bird’s not going to show up there. So you have a case where someone using that search function on the computer, if they’re just across that line so that their region is outside of the mapped range, the species won’t show up in their search results. Whereas, if you’re looking at a book, you’d say, “Oh, that’s possible, I’m right there.” And you’d make allowances for even if you’re several hundred miles outside of the mapped range, you might think, “Oh, I’ll keep that in mind. It’s possible.” And the computer just can’t do that. It gives you a black and white, yes or no, and it’s very difficult to program in that kind of fuzzy search that birders do automatically.

Do you have an iPhone?

I do. One of the things the developers are working on right now is converting the program to work on other smartphones. They’re working on a Blackberry version now, and I think they’ll be working on other versions for other platforms. Not being too iPhone-centric.

So what’s your take on electronic field guides? Obviously, you’ve talked about some limitations with them. One thing I’ve been wondering is who are they for?

Well, I think they’re here to stay. There’s no question that they’ll keep improving and becoming more popular. My sense is right now that most of the people who buy them will be less experienced birders. It’s the convenience. If you’re already carrying an iPhone, for $30 you can get the complete field guide and all the sounds and have it in your pocket with nothing else to carry. I think that’s the biggest appeal of it. A lot of birders, especially people who have been birding for a long time, will still prefer to use the book, but I imagine that new birders will be starting out and download the electronic guide and never look back.

You know, I’ve talked a little about the disadvantages of an electronic field guide or the advantages that a book has, but there are a lot of things that an electronic field guide can do better, like sounds. I think the most dramatic advantage is that all the sounds can be right there. I think as the devices get better and portable computers with bigger screens come along and the programming gets better, this will be a whole new way for me to think about how to present the information. As we experiment with it and see what works and what doesn’t work, and keep tweaking the way the program works, I think it’ll get better and better. And a lot of the disadvantages will disappear.

Eventually, I suppose it could replace books, but I don’t see it really completely replacing books for a long time. There’ll be a market for both.

Do you foresee Apple’s new iPad being a platform for your app, or are you looking into that yet?

Yes, definitely. One of the biggest limitations of the iPhone and other pocket computers is the size of the screen, so the iPad is very exciting, with the possibility of showing multiple images at once, and it opens up all kinds of possibilities for arranging the information that users need most.

I was going to ask you about the sounds. Who made the recordings?

They’re mostly from Lang Elliott and Kevin Colver. A few other recordists contributed stuff, and it was all compiled by Lang Elliot. And I think it’s just a phenomenal collection of recordings. I think it’s the best collection of North American bird sounds that you can buy. I really like the ability to search through species by species and select individual recordings, so if you want to compare the songs of Purple Finch and Cassin’s Finch, you can do that instantly. Just switch back from one to the other and listen to just the song. You don’t have to listen though a whole 60-second recording of songs and various calls.

That aspect of it, as a bird-sound field guide, it’s a huge step forward. Lang did a great job of putting together all the recordings.

I just downloaded the review copy this morning, and I noticed the compare feature. Was that hard to do?

[Laughs] Well, all I had to do was say that I think this is really important, and the developers did it, and they developed that for the Pocket PC, so I don’t know what sort of programming was involved in converting it to the iPhone, but they were able to do it. I think having the ability to compare two images or two sounds or two maps at the same time really takes away some of the advantage that the printed field guide has. So I thought it was a really important thing to have. And I love, especially, the ability to compare the sounds so that you can put up any two species you want, even if it’s like Common Loon versus Mourning Dove. [Laughs]

[The screen capture at right shows the comparison of Cassin's and Purple Finches in the app.]

Are there certain things that you’re looking for in future updates to the app, or is it too soon to say?

I’d really like to have the images larger. A lot of people who have looked at it over the last year or two when I’ve been working on it, and the few early comments that I’ve seen from users, everybody wants the images larger. And we knew that was an issue, and it’s partly a question of the size of the program. It’s over 6,000 images, and to increase the size of all of them to fill the screen on the iPhone would have made the size of the program much bigger. It’s already just under 300 megabytes, so it’s a pretty big program as it is. That’s something that we’ll work on and hopefully in the not-too-distant future have a new version that will have larger images.

All the images obviously came from The Sibley Guide to Birds. Were the maps all from your eastern and western guides, and did you update them in the time since those books were published?

Yes, they were from the eastern and western guides. But no, they weren’t updated. A few of them had to be updated for species like Cackling Goose and Dusky and Sooty Grouse, the species that were split. But other than that, no, it’s the maps straight out of the eastern and western guides.

Does it feel good to have it go live?

Yeah, I’m excited to finally have it out in the public and to let people start using it. There’s a point in every project where you’ve worked on it so long and not really gotten a lot of feedback, so I’m looking forward to having people use it and hearing what they think, what they like and don’t like. And the beauty of an electronic field guide is that it can be changed as often as you have the energy or the reason to change it. I’m looking forward to working on this into the future and continuing to improve it.

Read more about birding with the iPhone:

iPhone lets you carry a birding library in your hand (August 20, 2009)

In the know, all the time: Seven ways the iPhone will make you a better birdwatcher, by Laura Kammermeier (October 2009 issue, subscriber access only)

BirdsEye: New eBird-based iPhone app finds local birds and hotspots (December 1, 2009)

Interview with Kenn Kaufman about BirdsEye (December 1, 2009)

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In our April issue, colorful spring birds, hotspots, and guides to photo blinds and citizen-science projects

Chuck Hagner — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:19:00 GMT

I'm happy to announce that our April 2010 issue -- full of places to go birding this spring, a guide to photography blinds, a list of citizen-science projects that help birds and need volunteers, ID tips from David Allen Sibley and Kenn Kaufman, lots of great photos, and plenty more -- is now available online.

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The issue contains too much to summarize in a few paragraphs. Here are highlights:

Oklahoma's Spring Birding Eden
Author Gary Lantz describes his recent visit to one of the best birding locations you've probably never heard of -- Red Slough, in the Ouachita National Forest in Oklahoma. The Painted Bunting, the colorful bird on our cover, is just one of the many birds that make visiting the wildlife management area a real pleasure.

Windows on Nature: A Photographer's Guide to Blinds
An article sure to help you take better bird photos: Well-known photographer and longtime Birder's World contributor Steve Maslowski writes about blinds and cover-ups that he, his brother Dave, and his father Karl H. Maslowski have used through the years to photograph birds and other wildlife.

100+ Citizen-Science Projects
With the help of some of our very best friends, we assembled a list of more than 100 ways you can make your birdwatching count (and have a lot of fun). Look here for the species you're most interested in or a project near your home, then get involved!

Hotspots Near You
Experienced local birdwatchers describe four great places to go birding this spring:

Goldstream Provincial Park in Victoria, British Columbia -- Great for American Dipper, Chestnut-backed Chickadee, Varied Thrush, Townsend Warbler.
Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge in Sherman, Texas -- Where to be for migrating warblers, vireos, and American White Pelicans.
Fontenelle Forest in Bellevue, Nebraska -- "The single best place to see eastern birds near the western edge of their ranges and western birds near their eastern borders."
Mason Farm Biological Reserve in Chapel Hill, North Carolina -- The fields here teem with Blue Grosbeak, Indigo Bunting, and Yellow-breasted Chat.

See an interactive map of all the locations we've profiled in "Hotspots Near You."

Readers' Favorites: Warblers
Associate Editor Matt Mendenhall lists the 25 locations in the United States and Canada that visitors to BirdersWorld.com recently voted their favorite places to watch warblers.

Read how you can win Nikon binoculars by taking part in our next Readers' Favorites survey.

Help with bird identification
Of course, no issue of Birder's World would be complete without bird-ID pointers from Kenn Kaufman and David Allen Sibley, and this issue is no different.

In "ID Tips," Kenn Kaufman describes the field marks of five specialties of the Texas Hill Country: Golden-cheeked Warbler, Black-capped Vireo, Green Kingfisher, Audubon's Oriole, and Common Pauraque. Read more about Kenn.

In "ID Toolkit," David Allen Sibley explains why it sometimes pays to take note of behavior before field marks. You might just be able to recognize subspecies or distinguish residents from migrants. Read more about David.

Nuggets from contributing editors
Like every issue, our April issue also contains great contributions from Eldon Greij, Pete Dunne, Paul Kerlinger, and Julie Craves.

In "Amazing Birds," Founding Editor Eldon Greij explains one of the most fascinating areas of bird behavior: how birds use photoperiod, the always-changing number of hours of light and dark in a day, and precise internal clocks to initiate reproductive activities and to orient in the proper direction prior to migrating. Read more about Eldon.
In "Birder at Large," Pete Dunne, director of the Cape May Bird Observatory, recalls painter, environmental activist, raptor expert, and Cape May landmark Al Nicholson. Nicholson mentored Clay Sutton, co-author of the 1989 classic Hawks in Flight and other books, and was profiled in Jack Connor's 1991 bestseller Season at the Point. Read more about Pete.
In "On the Move," Paul Kerlinger describes the wing shape, flight strategies, and breeding and wintering ranges of a species of high interest to me and other rail watchers: the Virginia Rail. Even more interesting, Paul presents a surprisingly long list of questions about the rail's migration that still await answers from ornithologists and intrepid birdwatchers. Read more about Paul.
And in "Since You Asked," Julie Craves answers readers' questions about the best way to construct a backyard brush pile, whether birds other than robins regurgitate the seeds they consume, and why a Northern Cardinal that showed up in Zanesville, Ohio, recently would be bright yellow, not bright red. Read more about Julie.

Please take a look, and then let me know what you think. I'd be happy to hear from you! --Chuck Hagner, Editor

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New birding tourism resource aims to save endangered birds

Matt Mendenhall — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:58:00 GMT

In September 2006, Craig Thompson, chair of the International Committee of the Wisconsin Bird Conservation Initiative and a regional land program supervisor for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, flew to Ecuador with 11 other birders on a trip they dubbed the “Jocotoco Birdathon.” They had two goals: to see fabulous tropical birds, including the Jocotoco Antpitta, a black-capped songbird discovered in 1997 by renowned ornithologist Robert Ridgely, and to raise money that would be used to conserve land in Ecuador critical to birds.

Tropical Birding, a Quito-based tour service, ran the tour, and the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) co-sponsored it. During their eight-day stay, the birders tallied 385 species, including the antpitta (see it in this video), and they raised $14,000 for the Jocotoco Foundation, which protects eight reserves throughout Ecuador. Thompson described the trip in a fantastic article that we published in our June 2008 issue. (Subscribers can read it online.) The opening pages are shown below.

Now a new website has been launched that will enable birders everywhere to do what Thompson and his crew did: Plan a birding trip and support bird conservation at the same time. It even highlights the places the Wisconsin birders visited.

The site, ConservationBirding.org, is sponsored by ABC and partner organizations in Peru, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador, including the Jocotoco Foundation.

It is designed to help visitors plan their birding trips to help conservation by presenting detailed information on the reserves and ecolodges established by the conservation groups. It also lets users see reserves and ecolodges via Google Earth, presenting suggested routes, photographs of lodges and birds, and videos of rare and interesting species, such as the stunning Yellow-scarfed Tanager pictured above and the Rainbow Starfrontlet shown below.

The site offers suggested birding routes, such as the Santa Marta Route in Colombia, which covers “the most endemic-packed site in Colombia.” Exhibit A: The Santa Marta Screech-Owl was discovered at the El Dorado Bird Reserve, in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range in February 2007. Or you could plan a trip through central Peru, where you can look for the Yellow-scarfed Tanager and the endangered endemic Long-whiskered Owlet.

“We really think this is going to be a hit in the birding community,” says Bob Johns, ABC's public relations director. “Our plans are to grow the website substantially as time, dollars, and user input permit.”

That growth will include highlighting more routes and reserves. Mike Parr, vice president of ABC, says the site may eventually include birding destinations outside the Americas. Organizers also want birders to contribute photos, videos, and suggested routes.

“International birding travel is already popular, and we want more birders to know that their pastime can actually contribute to saving the species they love,” says Parr. “Visiting birders can provide a source of direct financial support to the reserves, helping them become self-sufficient and sustainable in the long-term.”

That's a goal we can all support. --Matt Mendenhall, Associate Editor

Photos: Yellow-scarfed Tanager by ProAves. Rainbow Starfrontlet photographed at the Utuana reserve in Ecuador by Dan Lebbin.

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Congratulations to our hummingbirds survey binocular winner!

Matt Mendenhall — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:13:00 GMT

Jeannette Fackler of Garrettsville, Ohio, pictured at right, is the winner of our third Readers' Favorites Survey. Congratulations, Jeannette!

She was one of more than 2,000 people who answered our survey about birdwatchers' favorite places to see hummingbirds. The survey was conducted in December and January. We'll publish the results here on BirdersWorld.com and in our upcoming June 2010 issue.

Jeannette wins a new pair of Monarch 8x36 binoculars from our generous partner, Nikon Sport Optics. And she tells me that she's looking forward to using them.

"I have been a casual birdwatcher for as long as I can remember," she says. "I do most of my birdwatching in my backyard. We are surrounded by woods, and we have a bird feeder that is frequently visited by all kinds of birds.

"My favorite birdwatching experience was when I was doing data entry from home and I had a good view of the hanging baskets on my front porch that are always being visited by hummingbirds. They are so beautiful to watch that they always put a smile on my face. I am disabled, and there are a lot of things I can no longer do, but the binoculars will allow me to even further enjoy the birdwatching I already do!"

You can win a Nikon binocular, too!

Here's how: Visit our Readers' Favorites Survey page to tell us your favorite places to find shorebirds. We offer more than 250 sites in all 50 states and 11 Canadian provinces to choose from, or you can write in your favorites. If you take the survey between February 19 and March 26, 2010, we'll enter your name in a drawing for another Nikon Monarch 8x36 binocular. (One entry per person, please.) We'll tally the results and publish the list of your favorite shorebirds spots in our August 2010 issue -- just in time for prime shorebird-watching season. --Matt Mendenhall, Associate Editor

Read about the winners of our first and second Readers' Favorites Surveys.

See results of our Readers' Favorites Surveys:

Readers' favorite places to watch eagles

Readers' favorite places to watch warblers

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Keep an eye out for young shrikes

Matt Mendenhall — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:31:00 GMT

According to data I downloaded on eBird today, birdwatchers reported Loggerhead Shrikes from Florida to California and as far north as Idaho and Maryland this winter. Counts peaked at more than 2,200 individuals during the week of January 1. In recent weeks, the shrikes seem to be most numerous in coastal Texas, Louisiana, and central California.

Now I'm wondering if any of them were juveniles, like the one pictured here.

As we noted in Birding Briefs in our February issue, Loggerheads typically begin their breeding cycle from now to mid-March, but a few birds have been observed breeding much earlier.

My friend Reuven Yosef, director of the International Birding and Research Center in Eilat, Israel, and a leading expert on the world’s shrikes, says he and fellow shrike researcher Susan Craig of Colorado Springs, Colorado, have seen active nests and recently fledged young in Florida and Texas from early January to early February.

The sightings suggest that Loggerheads had initiated breeding in mid-December, Yosef says. The scientists want to know more about how widespread early nesting is.

Juveniles are paler than adults and have narrow gray barring on their breasts. If you observe nesting adults or young Loggerhead Shrikes this winter, please write to Craig at scraig10@q.com. --Matt Mendenhall, Associate Editor

Photo: juvenile Loggerhead Shrike by Brian Garrett, used under a Creative Commons license

Read "Masked Predator," a 2007 feature story about the Loggerhead Shrike by Contributing Editor Julie Craves

Woodpecker experts haven't seen supposed Ivory-bill photos

Matt Mendenhall — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:09:00 GMT

At the risk of giving credibility to a possible hoax, here's what we know about the latest report of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker sighting.

If Daniel Rainsong has photos of a living Ivory-billed Woodpecker, as this press release claims, he has not yet shown them to two leading Ivory-bill experts.

Van Remsen, curator of birds at Louisiana State University's Museum of Natural Science and an adjunct professor of biological sciences at LSU, told me today that Rainsong visited him in Baton Rouge, "but he would not show me his photographic evidence. He said he had to develop them."

The comment suggested that Rainsong used a film camera. "I'll believe it when I see it," Remsen added. "I won't comment until I see the evidence."

Jerry Jackson, a professor at Florida Gulf Coast University and a co-author of the 2007 Draft Recovery Plan for the Ivory-bill, told me yesterday that he hadn't heard of Rainsong or seen his photos.

"I look forward to seeing them, but his approach already has me wondering," he said. "This seems to be the standard 'IB obsession' approach, similar to the last report we got with photos, which were of a Photoshopped Pileated."

Remsen and Jackson are among the handful of ornithologists who are regularly called upon to evaluate possible Ivory-bill sightings.

Remsen is a member of the American Ornithologists' Union's Committees on Classification and Nomenclature for North America and South America. Jackson wrote the account on the Ivory-bill (No. 711) in the Birds of North America reference series, and he is the author of In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (Smithsonian Books, 2004). Following a search for Ivory-bills in 2002, Jackson wrote "The Truth Is Out There" for the June 2002 issue of Birder's World.

Bloggers in the birding community have been skeptical of Rainsong's claims.

Cyberthrush, the author of Ivory-bills Live, says he places "NO conceivable credibility whatsoever in this story/report. NADA... ZIPPO... ZILCH!!!!!! (hope I'm making myself clear)."

Radd Icenoggle, author of Birds in Place: A Habitat-based Field Guide to Birds of the Northern Rockies (Far Country Press, 2003), notes that Rainsong "has, rather strangely, not released the images citing some obscure 'right of discovery.' Does he intend to patent the damn bird?"

Icenoggle and others have noted that Rainsong's name appears on a lot of gambling websites. Googling his name also turned up bits of an ad that has since been deleted from Craigslist having to do with a "wildlife research expedition." Kudos to Kirk Mona at Twin Cities Naturalist for piecing together most of the ad.

The ad refers to a $10,000 reward, supposedly for finding Ivory-bills. I'm not aware of a $10,000 reward, but the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has posted a reward that would pay $50,000 to anyone who could provide "video, photographic, or other compelling information and lead a project scientist to a living wild Ivory-billed Woodpecker." (Thanks Mike Duchek for the tip!)

"Obviously he's a long way from that," Remsen said. --Matt Mendenhall, Associate Editor

Art: Ivory-billed Woodpecker by John James Audubon

Read all the stories we've published, on paper and online, about recent searches for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

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State endangered-species lists are failing to protect species that need help the most

Matt Mendenhall — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:00:00 GMT

In our June 2008 issue, Jeffrey Wells, senior scientist for the Boreal Songbird Initiative, visiting fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and author of Birder's Conservation Handbook: 100 North American Birds at Risk, wrote an article about why the Endangered Species List doesn't come close to describing the status of all of America's birds.

"Because listing under the [Endangered Species Act] is a policy process, not a scientific process," he wrote, "many species that are endangered or threatened do not appear on the list."

He pointed out that the Red List published by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature includes 23 species that the ESA does not. Case in point: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has just announced that it will not list the Pacific seabird Cook's Petrel, a species listed as Vulnerable on the Red List.

Today, Wells and three colleagues have followed up with a new analysis of endangered-species lists in 47 states. Published by the open-access journal Public Library of Science-One, it shows that state lists are "failing to protect the species that need help the most and instead are focusing on common species that meet their range edges within states."

Wells's co-authors are Kenneth V. Rosenberg, director of conservation science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, David W. Mehlman, director of the Nature Conservancy’s Migratory Bird Program, and Bruce Robertson, a research associate at Michigan State University's W. K. Kellogg Biological Station in Hickory Corners, Michigan.

The researchers compiled a database of all birds listed as endangered, threatened, or of special concern by states and found that half of the listings are of species that are at low risk of extinction globally and have small proportions of their populations within the states that list them.

The Great Egret (pictured at right) is one of several examples the researchers found. It numbers as many as 2.2 million birds worldwide, yet it's listed as endangered in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, threatened in Connecticut and Wisconsin, and of special concern in eight states.

Other listings that, honestly, are difficult to comprehend, considering how large their populations are:

Bank Swallow: Threatened in California, special concern in Mississippi and Kentucky. Partners in Flight population estimate: 50 million.

Magnolia Warbler: Special concern in Virginia, special interest in Ohio. Partners in Flight population estimate: 30 million.

Dark-eyed Junco: Threatened in Ohio, special concern in Kentucky and Rhode Island. Partners in Flight population estimate: 260 million.

The downside is that birds that should be protected by states often are not.

Long-billed Curlew (pictured above) faces "increasing threats in the grasslands and prairies of North America, both on [its] breeding and wintering grounds," according to BirdLife International, yet it's listed in only six of 16 states in its range.

Lesser Prairie-Chicken, listed as Vulnerable on the Red List, is considered threatened in Colorado, but isn't listed by the other four states in which it breeds.

Bendire's Thrasher, which, according to BirdLife International, is "so rare that trends cannot be estimated reliably from Breeding Bird Survey data," is of special concern in California, yet receives no protection in five other states.

And Golden-winged Warbler, listed as Near Threatened on the Red List, is protected in only nine of the 18 states in its range.

"We hope these results will be used to strengthen species priority-setting systems for use at local and regional levels across the world," the authors write. And they point out that the developers of the international Red List can help: In 2003, they published guidelines to apply Red List criteria at regional levels. Seems like a good place to start. --Matt Mendenhall, Associate Editor

Long-billed Curlew photo by Mike Baird, bairdphotos.com. Flickr / CC BY 2.0

Great Egret photo by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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Eagles, ID help, and gorgeous photography kick off the new year

Chuck Hagner — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 18:07:00 GMT

Our February 2010 issue, the first of the new year, is now on newsstands.

I think you'll like it. Here are six solid reasons why:

David Allen Sibley tells how head patterns match up with five feather groups on common backyard birds -- Black-capped Chickadee, Song Sparrow, White-throated Sparrow, Downy Woodpecker, and Blue Jay.

Kenn Kaufman explains why voice is the most reliable way to separate Oak Titmouse and Juniper Titmouse, western birds that until the 1990s were considered to be one species (Plain Titmouse).

Pete Dunne describes returning to work as the official hawk counter at Cape May Point State Park three decades after conducting the inaugural count there.

Eldon Greij reveals how warming sea-surface temperatures are affecting the world's penguins.

Paul Kerlinger explains the nesting and migratory habits of the Gyrfalcon, the world's largest falcon.

And Julie Craves answers your questions about why some female cardinals' bills are coral-colored while others are gray or black, whether songbirds are active at night, and why Mourning Doves lose their toes. Fascinating!

Read more about our stellar team of contributing editors.

The issue also contains a collection of astonishing firsts:

The first Painted Bunting ever documented in Nunavut (Nunavut!). . . the first Marsh Wren ever in Alaska. . . the first Common Shelduck in North America. . . and the first Acorn Woodpecker ever recorded in Minnesota.

You can see photos in Birding Briefs, along with a nice shot of a pretty cool second -- the second White-chinned Petrel ever recorded in North America, the best bird seen during a pelagic off San Mateo, California, back in October.

Also in our February 2010 issue. . .

...We list the 25 locations in the United States and Canada that visitors to BirdersWorld.com voted their favorite places to watch majestic, spectacular eagles. (That's the reason for the Bald Eagle on our cover. The powerful, detailed portrait is the work of amazing Seattle photographer Jon Cornforth.)

Read how you can win Nikon binoculars in our current Readers' Favorites Survey -- about hummingbirds.

...Nature writer Chris Duke shares the field-tested insights of ornithologists to help you add Least Bittern and American Bittern to your life list. Duke explains where and when to look, what strategies to use, and what to look and listen for, and he lists 10 locations in the United States where the shy marsh-dwellers can be found.

...Associate Editor Matt Mendenhall summarizes how members of the Riveredge Bird Club ranked eight lightweight 8x binoculars from Alpen, Brunton, Bushnell, Eagle Optics, Minox, Nikon, Vixen, and Vortex.

...And David Shaw, a research biologist with the Alaska Bird Observatory, describes a birdwatching and photography trip to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in June. Shaw saw Yellow-billed and Red-throated Loons, Common Eiders, Long-tailed Ducks, American Golden-Plovers, Buff-breasted Sandpipers, and many other nesting birds as well as vast herds of caribou, and he writes beautifully. What's more, the photography -- taken by him and Sharon Cummings -- is spectacular.

Hotspots Near You

And last but not least, the February 2010 issue contains four excellent Hotspots Near You from four knowledgeable local birders:

...Doug Backlund, a biologist for the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish, and Parks and the president of Missouri Breaks Audubon, describes Fort Pierre National Grassland, Fort Pierre, South Dakota.

...Adam Marcus profiles Richard W. Dekorte Park in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. Adam wrote about Inwood Hill Park (Hotspot Near You No. 1) in our October 2006 issue.

...Bay Area birder and outdoors enthusiast Carolyn Longstreth describes the habitat, terrain, and birds of the Panoche Valley in San Benito County, California.

...And Anne Hughes, an avid St. John’s birder and a Birdingpal who enjoys helping visiting birders find target birds, tells about Quidi Vidi Lake, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

As you know, Hotspots Near You appears in every issue of Birder's World. In it, we ask experienced local birders to provide maps, directions, bird lists, links, contact information, and detailed descriptions of hotspots that are not only great for birding but also close to your home. Anne's profile of Quidi Vidi, our first in Newfoundland and Labrador but the fourth from Canada, brings the number of hotspots you can now find on BirdersWorld.com up to 84. Surely, there's one there for you.

Enjoy! -- Chuck Hagner, Editor

See the entire contents of the February 2010 issue of Birder's World.

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American Coots thwart nest invaders and kill their chicks

Matt Mendenhall — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:14:00 GMT

Here's a photo that grabbed our attention. An American Coot attacks a young chick and prepares to kill it. Bruce Lyon, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California Santa Cruz, shot the photo during the course of a research project that found that the coot's reproductive life is full of deception and violence.

Coots have evolved remarkable cognitive abilities that allow them to thwart other coots that lay eggs in their neighbors' nests. In 2003, Lyon showed that coots can count their own eggs and reject ones laid in their nests by other coots.

His latest findings, published this week in Nature, show that coot parents can tell the difference between their own chicks and any impostors that manage to hatch in their nest, and they will violently reject most impostor chicks.

Lyon's photo is stunning proof of an adult coot's reaction to finding a chick that is not its own.

Lyon and UCSC graduate student Dai Shizuka, lead author of the new paper, monitored nests on several wetlands near Williams Lake, British Columbia, from 1987 to 1990 and from 2005 to 2008.

Their research is particularly striking because so many birds seem to be unable to recognize the chicks of species such as cowbirds and cuckoos, which always lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. The behavior is called brood parasitism, and its success has posed a longstanding challenge to evolutionary theorists.

"When you see a little songbird struggling to feed an enormous cowbird chick, you have to wonder why it can't recognize the parasitic chick when it is so obvious to us," says Lyon. "The coot study shows that chick recognition can evolve, even when the chicks are the same species and all look the same to us."

The researchers found that coots learn to recognize their own chicks by using the chicks that hatch first as a template to which other chicks are compared. This learning mechanism may explain why it is so hard for chick recognition to evolve among the hosts of cowbirds and cuckoos, says Shizuka.

"Cuckoo and cowbird chicks tend to hatch before the host chicks, so their hosts can't use hatching order as a cue for chick recognition," he says. "As long as recognition has to be learned, you run the risk of learning incorrectly, and that could be the bottleneck. It's not that coots are exceptionally smart. They just have reliable information that allows them to do what we expect all hosts 'should' be doing to defend themselves against parasitism."

In coots, brood parasitism seems to be an optional component of a reproductive strategy based on laying large numbers of eggs. Depositing a few eggs in a neighbor's nest is just another way to increase the number of potential offspring.

Photo at left: an adult coot watches over a large brood.

The chances of survival in a neighbor's nest may be slim, but coots habitually lay more eggs than are likely to survive, Lyon says. Only in the best of years is there enough food for all of the chicks; in a typical year, about half of the chicks in each brood starve to death, he says. If a parasitic chick survives, another chick in the brood must die, which explains why coots have evolved such strong defenses against parasitism.

"We actually set out to study how coots bring their brood size into alignment with the availability of food, and what role hatching order plays in the culling process. But we kept seeing anecdotal evidence in the field that something else was going on," Lyon says. "With the parasitic chicks, they don't just let them starve. They attack them with a viciousness we hadn't seen before."

Adults actively sought impostor chicks from a distance to peck them vigorously and attempted to drown them, pecked them while brooding on the nest, and prevented them from access to the nest to be brooded, the researchers wrote.

Lyon and Shizuka also want to know what cues parents use to recognize their chicks. The possibilities include smell, vocal calls, and visual cues such as plumage. "Those are all plausible hypotheses, but we don't know yet," Shizuka says. --Matt Mendenhall, Associate Editor, with thanks to Tim Stephens, UC Santa Cruz

Photos by Bruce Lyon, UC Santa Cruz

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Donations triple reward for information on shooting of Whooping Crane

Matt Mendenhall — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:54:00 GMT

Contributions from two organizations have tripled the amount of a reward offered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons who shot and killed a Whooping Crane near Cayuga, Indiana.

Defenders of Wildlife, a national non-profit conservation organization, and the Indiana Turn in a Poacher or a Polluter Program are each donating $2,500 to the reward for information that leads to an arrest. The total reward is now $7,500.

Wildlife law enforcement agents with the FWS and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources are investigating the shooting of the crane, which happened sometime between Saturday, November 28, and Tuesday, December 1.

The Turn in a Poacher or a Polluter Program is a joint effort between the sportsmen and sportswomen of Indiana, concerned citizens and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. Through the program, any citizen can anonymously report violations of fishing, hunting, and environmental laws, and can be eligible for cash rewards. All of the money contributed to rewards comes from private donations.

“The Indiana TIP Program hopes that the increased reward amount will encourage some good citizen to come forward with information that will lead to the arrest of the person who did this,” said Phil Seng, a member of the TIP Citizen’s Advisory Board. “People who break hunting and fishing laws are not hunters or anglers. They are thieves who steal from all of us.”

Defenders of Wildlife often contributes to rewards for information when endangered or state-listed species are killed, according to Caroline Kennedy, senior director of field conservation for the organization.

"It is tragic that such an important bird in the recovery effort was killed," Kennedy said. "We hope that the additional reward money that Defenders of Wildlife is providing will help lead to a conviction in the death of this bird."

Observations reported by the public play a key role in solving wildlife crime, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Special Agent Buddy Shapp. “People who live in an area notice details that can tell us a lot,” Shapp said. “They sometimes see something or hear something that strikes them as unusual but not necessarily criminal. People might not realize that their observation is significant.”

Anyone with information should call the Indiana Department of Natural Resources 24-hour hotline at: 1-800 TIP IDNR (800-847-4367), or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at 317-346-7016. Callers can remain anonymous. --Matt Mendenhall, Associate Editor

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Congratulations to our warblers survey binocular winner!

Chuck Hagner — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:02:00 GMT

We have our second winner in our Readers' Favorites Survey!

In our December 2009 issue, we asked you to tell us your favorite places in the United States and Canada to see warblers, and as you did when we requested locations to watch eagles, you came through.

Big time.

Many, many thanks for taking the time to share your expertise, and thank you for your comments. Once again, your responses will help us paint a colorful, useful portrait of birdwatching in North America -- and just in time for the spring migration.

We’ll publish the results of the warbler survey right here on BirdersWorld.com and also in our upcoming April 2010 issue, scheduled to appear on newsstands on March 2.

By that time, Cathy Theisen of Ann Arbor, Michigan, will have a brand-new pair of binoculars. Hers was the name that came up when we conducted our drawing for the Monarch 8x36 binoculars generously provided by our partner, Nikon Sport Optics. You can see Cathy pictured here.

Read about the binocular winner from our first Readers' Favorites Survey.

For information about Nikon Sport Optics, visit http://www.nikonbirding.com/?source=birdersworld.

Cathy, a veterinarian, is a member of the Washtenaw Audubon Society and an accomplished birder with a life list approaching 600 species. (She and a guide saw 110 species in a single day in Costa Rica!) So she knows a thing or two about finding warblers. She selected the following four hotspots as her favorites (all are in her home state, and one is in her hometown):

Mio, Grayling - Two famous jumping-off points for tours of the core breeding range of the endangered Kirtland’s Warbler. Mio, in Oscoda County, is the gathering place for outings organized by the U.S. Forest Service. Grayling, in Crawford County, is the departure point for tours conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Michigan Audubon Society.

Tawas Point, on Lake Huron - Well-known gathering place for waterfowl and shorebirds from early March through May, and a stopover point for all sorts of northbound migrants in May.

Whitefish Point, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula - Projecting into Lake Superior, a natural funnel that concentrates migrant birds by the tens of thousands every spring and fall. Site of the Whitefish Point Bird Observatory.

Nichols Arboretum - The University of Michigan’s beautiful hundred-year-old collection of native and exotic trees and shrubs in Ann Arbor. Right in Cathy's backyard. Nichols Arb is great for spring and fall migration, she says, but it's not the setting for her best birdwatching story. That distinction goes to Banff National Park in Canada.

"I was setting up a scope to glass a pond that the park ranger had sent us to for waterfowl, only about 10 minutes in from the road. I caught movement from the corner of my eye and turned to see a sub-adult grizzly coming up the trail! He made a wide circle around us and went on foraging, but left me tingling with excitement. One of the peak experiences of my life!” (For future reference, bear updates from Banff are available here.)

How does Cathy plan to use the Nikon Monarch binoculars she won in our drawing?

“For sharing. I take a lot of novices birding," she writes. "Most notably, I have a little sister through Big Brothers Big Sisters (phone 888-412-BIGS). She is working on her life list and will be delighted that I have a second pair of good binos!”

You can win a Nikon binocular, too!

Here's how: On December 28, two weeks from today, we'll start our third Readers' Favorites Survey. In it, we'll ask you to tell us your favorite places to find hummingbirds. Please do so! If you take the survey by January 22, 2010, we'll enter your name in a drawing for another Nikon Monarch 8x36 binocular. (One entry per person, please.) We'll tally the results and publish the list of your favorite hummingbird spots in our June 2010 issue.

Congratulations, Cathy! --Chuck Hagner, Editor

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How a redpoll on red-osier dogwood ended up on the cover of our December issue

Matt Mendenhall — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:05:00 GMT

For the cover of our December 2009 issue, we knew we wanted a shot of a winter finch -- one of a handful of hardy northern songbirds that wander unpredictably each year -- but we didn't know which one. We would have been happy with a Pine Grosbeak, White-winged Crossbill, or Purple Finch, but when we saw Marie Read's beautiful, engaging photo of a Common Redpoll, we knew we had our bird.

Read is a talented nature photographer from Ithaca, New York, and a special friend of ours. We've been publishing her work for 20 years.

The annual movements of redpolls and other winter finches are the subject of Paul Kerlinger's December "On the Move" column, in which he calls them "maybe birds" -- maybe they'll show up, maybe they won't. Winter finches, he writes, "keep us guessing and add spice to our birding after the warblers, vireos, and others have left for warmer regions."

When I've watched winter finches, I've usually been at a park or other green space with plenty of natural seeds to lure in the birds. I don't normally think of them as backyard birds. But that's just what Read's subject was. "This redpoll was one of several that was coming to the feeders in my backyard in the winter of 2004," she told me.

Like almost all photographers today, Read uses digital equipment. But back when she took this photo, she was still shooting on film. "I used a Nikon F5 camera, 500mm lens, and 1.4x teleconverter. I switched to digital photography and Canon equipment the next year."

"The red-osier dogwood that the bird is perched in is a shrub that's been growing wild in my overgrown and very unmanicured yard for years," she says. "In fact, it's the same one that gave me my very first Birder's World cover back in 1991. In winter, I move my bird feeders around the yard so that they are near the shrubbery where I want the birds to land."

Read says the shrub is now in a totally different place than it was originally.

"A beaver dam broke behind my property a few years ago, and the yard was totally flooded. The shrub was uprooted and washed downstream, where it got caught against a culvert right by my house -- not in a photogenic location. It's been growing there ever since! Ever year I look at it and think I'll dig it up and put it back where it's supposed to be, but I never do. It makes a lovely colorful backdrop for bird images."

We couldn't agree more. --Matt Mendenhall, Associate Editor

Read about the December 2009 issue of Birder's World magazine.

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Operation Migration receives $15,000 after hangar break-in

Matt Mendenhall — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:25:00 GMT

After all the bad news about Whooping Cranes and their human caretakers — the shooting death of an adult female, the vandalism at the Operation Migration hangar, and the recent crash-landing of the top-cover Cessna in a farm field in southern Illinois — it's time for a bit of good news.

The TD Friends of the Environment Foundation, a Canadian organization that funds local environmental projects, has announced that it is donating $15,000 to Operation Migration to help repair the destruction at its hangar caused by vandals. At the time news of the break-in was announced, lead pilot and co-founder Joe Duff said it could cost $20,000 to replace the four ultralight wings that were damaged.

The gift will go a long way toward helping OM overcome the senseless break-in and vandalism.

Mary Desjardins, executive director of the foundation, says she and her colleagues read about the vandalism in the Toronto Star a few days ago and decided to act.

"We were moved by the story, and we wondered who would do such a thing," she says. "We were familiar with the organization and the important work that they do, so we wanted to reach out and contribute. And we're also hoping to raise the profile of Operation Migration so that perhaps other funding organizations will help out."

In recent years, TD Friends of the Environment Foundation has donated to other non-profits that focus on birds, including Bird Studies Canada and Medicine River Wildlife Centre in central Alberta.

If you'd like to do your part for the cranes and pilots, donate to Operation Migration's Give a Whoop! campaign, which celebrates the group surpassing 10,000 miles of flying with cranes. -- Matt Mendenhall, Associate Editor

Photo: An ultralight flies with Whooping Cranes at Necedah NWR. Photo by Matt Mendenhall

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Birder's World site receives 2009 Eddie Award for editorial excellence

Chuck Hagner — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:03:00 GMT

Matt, Julie, and I got some very good news this week: BirdersWorld.com received a 2009 silver Eddie Award for excellence in online editorial from Folio magazine.

The Eddie and Ozzie Awards, conducted annually, are the largest awards competition in magazine publishing. The Ozzies recognize excellence in magazine design. The Eddies recognize editorial excellence. We couldn't be happier.

See a list of all 2009 Eddie Award winners.

As I'm sure you know, we gave our site a long-overdue, top-to-bottom overhaul at the beginning of the year. The new site -- heck, now I can call it our award-winning site -- launched on March 18 after many weeks of analysis, brainstorming, and focused, creative effort by a team of very talented people: Web Project Lead Alex Gaudynski, Interactive Designer Jon Truelove, Senior Online Programmer Craig Kuhlow, Associate Editor Matt Mendenhall, Photo Editor Ernie Mastroianni, and Editorial Associates Julie Kuczynski and Jessica Eskelsen. If you get the chance, please join me in congratulating them.

Our Eddie Award is a testament to their hard work and creativity, and it suggests to me -- and I hope you agree -- that we took a big step toward accomplishing the goals we set for ourselves at the beginning of the year.

First and foremost, we wanted to create a site that served you well. That is, we wanted it to be easy for you to subscribe, renew, arrange gift subscriptions, manage your account, get answers to your questions, even send a letter to the editor. How'd we do? Since we're always looking for ways to improve, I'd always be happy to hear from you. (You can contact our customer service department here.)

We wanted to showcase our outstanding contributing editors: Julie Craves, Pete Dunne, Eldon Greij, Kenn Kaufman, Paul Kerlinger, and David Allen Sibley. (You can read more about them here.) I think they're the best in the business -- knowledgeable, easy to understand, often funny, always on the mark. Even if you've been a subscriber for only a short time, you can read online what they've been contributing to Birder's World for years.

We wanted to gather together all the reporting we've done over the years about great birdwatching destinations. This remains a work in progress, too, as we're adding stories, old and new, all the time. Most recently, we added feature articles about one place I can't wait to visit -- Florida's Dry Tortugas National Park -- and another I can't recommend highly enough: Veracruz, Mexico.

Also online is the web version of our popular print feature "Hotspots Near You." In it you can now find 80 concise profiles of easily accessible birding destinations in the U.S. and Canada. And just this week, we added the first installment of a brand-new collection of hotspot articles: our readers' 25 favorite places to watch eagles. Just imagine if the Folio judges had seen that!

We wanted to create online galleries for your photographs of birds: Birds in your backyard. Birds in the U.S. and Canada. Birds from around the world. Atypical birds. Rare birds. Now these galleries not only exist but, thanks to you, are full of excellent images. Consider these examples: A Painted Bunting that showed up in Nunavut. The recent Ancient Murrelet in St. Joseph, Michigan. The MacGillivray's Warbler that was in Boston. The Ivory Gull being seen now at Cape May. (You can view a keyword cloud of all the species represented in our galleries here.)

See the most recent Photo of the Week.

We also wanted to continue serving as an online coffee shop for birdwatchers from all over. Thanks to you (again), our forums are now filled with people asking and answering questions, sharing photos and information, making friends, making each other laugh, and learning about birds. Why don't you join them?

And last but not least, we wanted an effective way to keep you always in the know. We do this via our blog, Birder's World Field of View. Just last week, it was the place to go for information about BirdsEye, the groundbreaking new app from Kenn Kaufman and eBird. Last night, it was where we reported the heartbreaking news that a Whooping Crane had been shot to death in Indiana. Please check back often for updates on these stories and new ones.

And please let me know what you think about the award-winning BirdersWorld.com. We're proud of our Eddie Award, but not so proud that we think there's nothing we could do better. Please leave a comment. I'd be happy to hear from you. --Chuck Hagner, Editor

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Whooping Crane shot, reward offered

Matt Mendenhall — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:57:00 GMT

A seven-year-old Whooping Crane — the only successful breeding female from the eastern migratory population — was shot and killed in western Indiana, near the town of Cayuga in central Vermillion County, officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the International Crane Foundation said today.

The crane, known as 17-02, and her mate, 11-02, hatched two chicks in summer 2006 and one in summer 2009 at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in central Wisconsin. One of the 2006 birds survived. The parents have been the only adults in the eastern population to raise a chick and lead it to wintering grounds in Florida.

In late November, cranes 17-02 and 11-02 had stopped at a marsh in Indiana, a place they typically stop at on their southbound migration. Eva Szyszkoski, tracking field manager for the International Crane Foundation, observed the pair on November 28 during an aerial survey. On her return flight on Tuesday, December 1, 17-02 was missing. Ground tracker Jess Thompson raced to the area and found the bird dead near a ravine, not far from a rural county road.

Thompson declined to comment on the bird's condition when she found it because law-enforcement officers are conducting an investigation. She said that the tracking team is keeping tabs on 11-02 with the help of Indiana wildlife officials.

"Not only have we lost one of our breeding pairs, we have lost our only successful breeding pair," wrote Szyszkoski. "Hopefully #11-02 will be able to find a new mate, but since we are still low on the female-to-male ratio, I don't know how soon that may be."

Indiana Department of Natural Resources conservation officers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service special agents are conducting a joint investigation into the incident. FWS is offering a minimum reward of $2,500 to the person or people who provide information leading to a conviction.

Anyone with information should call the Indiana DNR 24-hour hotline at (800) 847-4367 or the FWS at (317) 346-7016. Callers can remain anonymous. -- M.M.

Photo: Whooping Cranes 11-02 and 17-02 with their two wild-hatched chicks in the summer of 2006. Photo credit: Joan Garland, International Crane Foundation

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