|
|
Home »
Birdwatching »
Birding Briefs »
Canadian owls and Mexican songbirds invade U.S., coffee farms and birds, Hawaii loses a native honeycreeper, and more news about birds
Canadian owls and Mexican songbirds invade U.S., coffee farms and birds, Hawaii loses a native honeycreeper, and more news about birdsBirding Briefs -- April 2005
Published: February 16, 2005  A Great Gray Owl flies toward Jean Chateauvert's camera lens in Quebec in January.
Photo by © Jean Chateauvert
Canadian Owls, Mexican Songbirds Invade U.S.
The winter of 2004-05 couldn't have been more exciting for birders. Mexican songbirds showed up in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas. Birders saw Blue Bunting, Rose-throated Becard, Golden-crowned Warbler, Crimson-collared Grosbeak, Social Flycatcher, and White-throated Robin. Texas birder John Arvin says it's hard to tell why birds wandered farther than usual, but the species all feed on insects and fruit and occur in lowlands or lower montane habitats.
Owls that normally occur in Canada year-round were big news from Minnesota east to New York. Great Gray Owls were "dripping from the trees," according to birders who flocked to the Sax-Zim Bog north of Duluth, Minnesota. Through mid-January, more than 1,700 Great Grays were reported in the North Star State. Banders on Lake Superior's north shore banded more than 300 Boreal Owls, and the species was recorded in western New York and in New York City's Central Park. Northern Hawk Owls became reliable birds to chase in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and southern Canada. The owls probably moved south due to a decline in prey in Canada's boreal forest, experts said.
Varied Thrush, which normally winters from coastal British Columbia to northern California, spread out across the United States this winter. Dozens of birds were seen from North Dakota to Kansas to Massachusetts.
The rarest bird of the season, however, was spotted with the most common bird of any season. A Redwing, a thrush native to Eurasia, mixed into a flock of American Robins in Olympia, Washington, just before Christmas. It was the first Redwing ever spotted in western North America, and it drew birders from more than a dozen states and provinces as it foraged on lawns and in holly trees. |
Your Photos of the Owl Invasion
Jean Chateauvert, whose Great Gray Owl photo is featured at the top of this page, is one of several birdersworld.com visitors to send us owl photos this winter. We really like seeing your great owl photos, so we thought we'd post them here for all to enjoy.
If you haven't seen Fernando Cerra's photo of one of Texas's Crimson-collared Grosbeaks from this winter that we posted as a recent Photo of the Week, click here or on the link above. What a bird!
And if you have shot digital pictures of Mexican songbirds in Texas, out-of-range Varied Thrushes, Washington State's Redwing, or Boreal, Northern Hawk, or Great Gray Owls this winter, send them to mmendenhall AT birdersworld.com. Tell us your name, where you live, and where you saw the bird. We'd love to post more newsworthy pics from readers!
-- Matt Mendenhall, Associate Editor |
Photo by © Peter Harris
Peter Harris found this Boreal Owl in a cedar tree next to his house near Ottawa, Ontario. He photographed it with a Canon EOS 20D digital camera and efs 17-85mm lens.
|
Photo by © Pete Parker
Pete Parker of Port Aransas, Texas, spent a week watching and photographing Great Gray Owls in Minnesota's Sax-Zim Bog. On several days, he counted close to 70 Great Grays and a handful of Northern Hawk Owls. |
Photo by © Jean Chateauvert
Jean Chateauvert sent us this close-up of a Boreal Owl that he photographed at Lac Beauport near Quebec City. |
Photo by © Richard Ennis
A Great Gray leaves its perch head-first in search of prey. Whatever the owl heard must have been fast because this hunting attempt was a bust. Richard Ennis of Jericho, Vermont, captured the photo at Ile Bizard in Quebec, a small island outside of Montreal. Richard tells us several owls have been spotted on the island. "It is amazing to watch these Owls hunt as they can hear their prey moving under the snow-covered ground," he says. "I would just stand back and wait for them to move, then get ready with the camera." |
Photo by © William Snyder
William Snyder captured this Great Gray Owl photo at Sault St. Marie, Michigan. "The owl was hanging out on the edge of a field flying back and forth between some trees and finally landed on the fence post," he says. "I used a Canon 1D MkII with 500mm lens leaning against a tree to capture the image."
You can see more of Bill's photos here.
|
Photo by © Jody Hildreth
Jody Hildreth lives in central New York State. He took a day trip to Kanata, Ontario (just west of Ottawa) to see Great Gray Owls.
"I left the house at 1:30 am, spent the entire day looking and photographing over 20 different owls, and returned home by 9:30 pm.," he says. "It was a great day of viewing these majestic birds. To get these photos I drove around back roads looking for good candidates."
He used a Canon EOS-20D with a Canon 400mm F5.6 lens.
Jody is a library media specialist at Sauquoit Valley Elementary School and the webmaster for KidWings, a fun website designed to teach "about the wonders of birds." |
Coffee Farms Need More Than Just Shade Trees
Many birders buy shade-grown coffee because shaded coffee plantations provide critical tropical habitat for migratory and resident birds. But a recent study from Mexico found that the presence of shade trees doesn't guarantee a farm's suitability for a wide range of species.
Andrea Cruz-Angon, a scientist with Mexico's Instituto de Ecología, reported last year on how birds use and benefit from epiphytes, which are plants that spend all or part of their lives attached to other plants. Epiphytes include cacti and orchids.
Many shade-grown coffee farmers believe that epiphytes slow the growth of their crops, so they painstakingly remove epiphytes from their trees. Cruz-Angon studied bird populations before and after farmers removed epiphytes from seven acres of study plots. She discovered that the mix of bird species changed in the area and the total number of birds declined once the epiphytes were gone. Not only that, but insect diversity dropped and more weeds grew. Cruz-Angon also notes that she hasn't found data "to support the supposed agronomic benefits of removing epiphytes."
In a summary of her work published on the Smithsonian National Zoological Park website, she adds: "It appears that farmers could save time, money, and birds by not removing epiphytes from the shade trees on their coffee farms."
|
Orioles Are More Similar Than You Might Think
Scientists investigating how different or similar two bird species are typically look at a wide range of indices, including size, anatomy, behavior, vocalizations, and distribution. They also study the species' age - that is, they compare how long ago each species branched off the evolutionary tree. They do this by testing mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is extracted from feathers or other tissue. Most of today's songbird species split from their closest relatives between 1 million and 4 million years ago.
When scientists look at the mtDNA for birds in the same genus, they usually see differences of two to eight percent between species. In general, every two-percent distinction represents a million years of avian evolution. The more genetic divergences, the longer each species has been distinct.
With that in mind, the case of the Baltimore Oriole and Black-backed Oriole, close relatives in the genus Icterus, is quite surprising. The birds' mtDNA differ from one another by only 0.25 percent, meaning that they're more closely related to each other than nearly all other sister species in the bird kingdom. The University of Maryland Baltimore County scientists who discovered the close kinship believe that the two orioles separated from one another only in the last 150,000 to 200,000 years.
The orioles' genetic similarities are even more striking considering their differences in appearance, range, and migratory behavior. The color patterns of black and orange on the males of each species are noticeably different. Baltimore Oriole winters in Central America and South America and migrates to eastern North America to breed. Black-backed Oriole, conversely, lives in Mexico year-round, migrating short distances between winter and breeding areas.
Beatrice Kondo, Jason Baker, and Kevin Omland published their findings in the August 2004 Condor.
Birding Briefs was compiled with contributions from Terry Dunn.
|
This Just In
New York City's famous Red-tailed Hawks made headlines nationwide when they were evicted from their nest on a luxury Manhattan apartment building. After a week of bad press and outcry from birders, the building's co-op board agreed to replace the spikes that support Pale Male and Lola's nest. The birds began to rebuild the nest a few weeks later.
The last known Po'ouli, a small honeycreeper found only on the island of Maui, died in captivity in November. The species is probably extinct. The only remaining wild pair has not been seen for months.
The federal government will not protect the Greater Sage-Grouse under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently said. The decision is a victory for Western developers and lawmakers who believe listing the species would impose restrictions on land use across the bird's range.
At least 10 percent of all bird species will disappear by 2100, according to Stanford University researchers who have studied extinction rates. Since 1500, 1.3 percent of species have gone extinct, but the global number of individual birds has declined by 20 to 25 percent.
Grassroots efforts by birders and nature lovers last year saved critical habitat in Ecuador for the endangered El Oro Parakeet. The species' population is estimated to be 125 birds. Larry and Sara Wan, founders of the Western Alliance for Nature, campaigned to purchase an 80-acre forest parcel where the parakeet nests and raised enough money in less than two months.
|
|
Not a registered member? It's free to sign up.
See great photos of birds, get birdwatching tips, learn about birding events, and more!
|