A Visit to Jamaica Bay

I’m writing this in my daughter’s apartment in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. I’ve been spending a week in New York City with Katie and my future son-in-law and their dog Muxy. They’re in a new apartment, and the very first species I saw in their yard was a Northern Cardinal. So far I only have four species here, with Rock Pigeon, European Starling, and House Sparrow making up the balance.

Katie's backyard cardinal

Last year when I came in December, I spent time at the Brooklyn Bridge with Heather Wolf, who wrote Birding at the Bridge: In Search of Every Bird on the Brooklyn Waterfront. This year I was on my own, and most days had something going on with family. But Tuesday I decided to visit the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. So first thing in the morning, I walked with Katie to the subway. She got on the A train headed for Manhattan where she works; I went down a level and hopped on the A train headed in the opposite direction, toward Far Rockaway in Queens.

It was a nice long ride, much above ground, and I regretted having my binoculars in my backpack for the nice long stretch near JFK Airport, where we passed lots of waterfowl, including Mute Swans and Brants. When I got out at the stop marked “Broad Channel,” I pulled my binocs out of my backpack and took a short stroll through a neighborhood that brought me to the Cross Bay Boulevard, about ¾ mile from refuge headquarters. There’s a nice walking and biking path along there past waterfront houses, with a couple of access points for looking at birds in the water. I was already regretting bringing my more portable 8x32 binoculars instead of my heavier, bulkier 10x42s, and through the day wished I’d had more power for the distant birds.

At the first access point, right when I got on the Boulevard, I walked close to the water and set my backpack down. First I turned on the eBird app on my cell phone. It has a cool new GPS feature that not only keeps track of the time you begin and end, but also exactly where you walk, so all I had to do was mark in the birds I saw and now I have a permanent record of the trip.

Then I pulled out my camera and lens. I had to move slowly, because just a few feet away were a pair of Mute Swans—I wanted some nice face close-ups, so had to be careful not to scare them. There was enough vegetation between us to make it hard to take the perfect photograph, but I didn’t mind. I prefer my photos to show birds as they really are, not as I wish they would pose for me. I saw plenty of Mute Swans from the train, but these were the only ones I saw on the walk.

That first spot was also where I took my best photos of Brant. These saltwater geese are abundant, but not the least bit sociable as far as humans are concerned, so I don’t have any good close-up photos. The photos I took were not just my best Brant photos of the day—they’re the best I’ve ever taken.

The other access spots along the walk weren’t quite as good, but the walk was fun. The Callahead Porta-Potty company’s headquarters are right there, so I saw lots of pumping trucks with such messages as “Number One in Dealing with Number Two.” Road traffic was moderate, but I didn’t pass any pedestrians and only one bicyclist before I got to the refuge headquarters.

The Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge is part of Gateway National Recreation Area, making this the only wildlife refuge administered by the National Park Service. It’s open Wednesdays through Sundays, and since I was there on a Tuesday, the visitor center was closed, but the bathroom was open and clean. Russ and I went there with Katie and Michael a few years ago, during fall migration when it was hopping with people. This was an entirely different experience.

I didn’t have the refuge entirely to myself—as I walked the 1.7 mile loop around the East Pond, I passed three couples. One woman wore binoculars, and we had the kind of quick, friendly exchange birders always do when they’re having fun but aren’t seeing many birds. Most of the water birds were too far away for great photos, and there weren’t all that many songbirds—I came upon one flock of robins, and two collections of skittish, photo-shy Yellow-rumped Warblers with some sparrows, but didn’t see a single chickadee. There were a few thick conifers near the path that I checked thoroughly just in case a Saw-whet Owl might be hidden within.

I saw 30 species on the walk—fewer than I’d hoped for, but I took a lot of joy in seeing each one. Finding moments of real solitude in view of Manhattan seems improbable.

With the current push toward privatizing parks and refuges, this kind of urban wildness adventure may soon be a luxury of the past, but I relished every moment. New York New York IS a wonderful town.

The Bronx is up and the Battery's down. 

Here are my eBird lists. This first one is from where I started walking along the Cross Bay Boulevard up to reaching the refuge headquarters. 

Broad Channel, south of JBWR HQ, Queens, New York, US

Dec 19, 2017 11:05 AM - 11:33 AM

Protocol: Traveling

0.688 mile(s)

20 species (+3 other taxa)

Snow Goose (Anser caerulescens)  2

Brant (Branta bernicla)  300

Canada Goose (Branta canadensis)  27

Mute Swan (Cygnus olor)  2

Gadwall (Mareca strepera)  10

Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos)  12

American Black Duck (Anas rubripes)  10

Greater/Lesser Scaup (Aythya marila/affinis)  2

Bufflehead (Bucephala albeola)  4

Ruddy Duck (Oxyura jamaicensis)  4

Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias)  1

Ring-billed Gull (Larus delawarensis)  2

Herring Gull (Larus argentatus)  8

Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus)  1

gull sp. (Larinae sp.)  10

Rock Pigeon (Feral Pigeon) (Columba livia (Feral Pigeon))  50

Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura)  2

crow sp. (Corvus sp. (crow sp.))  1

Ruby-crowned Kinglet (Regulus calendula)  1

European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris)  55

Song Sparrow (Melospiza melodia)  2

House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus)  1

House Sparrow (Passer domesticus)  15

The second checklist is from my walk around the East Pond at the refuge. 

Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, Queens, New York, US

Dec 19, 2017 11:41 AM - 12:52 PM

Protocol: Traveling

1.713 mile(s)

23 species (+1 other taxa)

Snow Goose (Anser caerulescens)  10

Brant (Branta bernicla)  2000

Canada Goose (Branta canadensis)  200

Wood Duck (Aix sponsa)  1

Northern Shoveler (Spatula clypeata)  8

Gadwall (Mareca strepera)  2

Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos)  30

American Black Duck (Anas rubripes)  18

Bufflehead (Bucephala albeola)  4

Ruddy Duck (Oxyura jamaicensis)  6

cormorant sp. (Phalacrocoracidae sp.)  10

Ring-billed Gull (Larus delawarensis)  1

Herring Gull (Larus argentatus)  30

Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura)  22

Belted Kingfisher (Megaceryle alcyon)  1

Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens)  1

Northern Flicker (Yellow-shafted) (Colaptes auratus auratus/luteus)  2

American Robin (Turdus migratorius)  11

European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris)  45

Yellow-rumped Warbler (Setophaga coronata)  20

American Tree Sparrow (Spizelloides arborea)  1

Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis)  1

White-throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis)  2

Song Sparrow (Melospiza melodia)  5

The people ride in a hole in the ground.

An Open Letter to Senator Al Franken

Dear Mr. Franken:

I’m a Minnesotan who has admired you since your earliest Saturday Night Live skits, through your movies, your Air America days and book publications, up to your election and re-election as my U. S. Senator. There was always a sophomoric element to some Saturday Night Live skits that I found off-putting, just like the USO skits I've been seeing lately, but there was also a lot of more sophisticated humor exactly to my liking, much of it written by and/or featuring you.

I liked you because of SNL. I started loving you after I saw When a Man Loves a Woman and, especially, Stuart Saves His Family, which was rather a lifeline for me when it came out while I was going through a very difficult time. The personal lives of artists can be quite separate from their work, but I find it hard to believe that someone who speaks with so much understanding about fragile and vulnerable people would himself prey on vulnerable people.

As an assault victim myself, and the victim of various forms of sexual harassment over my life (you are exactly the same age as my husband and me), I think the #me,too and #Ibelieveher movements are timely and important. Tragically, your long track record of understanding and supporting important women’s issues is exactly what has put you in such an untenable situation now, and fully explains your reticence to defend yourself more strenuously after both the original Leann Tweeden charges and then additional people complaining about you groping them in photo ops. My default position has always been to believe the victim, but verify.

Tina Dupuy's article in the Atlantic, summarizing the charges against you in the worst possible light and saying she believes these charges because when she asked for a photo op, you “groped” her and “copped a feel,” said that your egregious sin was to place your hand on her waist. In the photo accompanying the article, her arm is around you, her hand on your shoulder, her head tilting toward yours, but she was left traumatized because your hand was on her waist?

I write books about birds and produce a radio program/podcast about them, so at book signings and visits to community radio stations like KAXE in Grand Rapids and KUMD in Duluth, men sometimes ask me for photo ops, and they virtually always put their arm around me. They want the picture to show that we've established a friendly if momentary relationship—that's the whole point. Sometimes a guy's hand doesn't find the proper target to begin with. These are hurried encounters, and often people feel pressured to get it over with because there's a line, plus they (and I) are often nervous, so I know the most awkward hand placement can often be entirely unintended. As the victim of attempted rape and assault, I know the difference between awkward human encounters and sexual assault.

I can understand some women who have been victimized in the past being triggered and traumatized by what for others would seem innocuous. But if an adult honestly can't handle an associate touching her waist in a photo op that she herself asked for, shouldn't it be her responsibility to make her limits clear from the start?

Back in the 1980s when our congressman, Jim Oberstar, did a town hall in Duluth, I gave a little spiel about some legislation that would have serious effects on birds. When it was all over, I was among the crowd leaving UMD when Mr. Oberstar was being led out by his staff, who were surrounding him to usher him away more quickly. He saw me, broke away from them, and walked straight over, gave me a huge bear hug, and said, “I like you!” I thought that was a lovely thing.

Your situation upsets me on a personal level. You of all the politicians I’ve ever paid attention to seem uniquely vulnerable as a human being to being wounded by such charges. It of course also distresses me on a political level. After your masterful questioning during Session’s Senate testimony and your longstanding work to protect net neutrality, coming to a vote this very week, the charge sparking this whole thing, with Roger Stone's heads up days beforehand, feels both uniquely politically motivated and uniquely politically damaging to the best of everything the Democratic Party stands for.

It also upsets me with regard to the specific issue of sexual harassment. I believe a full investigation of the charges against you, and against other Congressmen and Senators, would help clarify which offenses are truly toxic and even illegal, and which are ones people can deal with and move on from, allowing all of us to become more sensitive human beings. Democrats have historically stood for redemption and progress.

This entire movement to protect women will have been for naught if all it succeeds in doing is to destroy the careers of a few men without clearing a pathway to move forward so our daughters and granddaughters can live their lives without having to deal with the kinds of real assaults and harassment the #me,too movement is bringing to light.

I have been so proud to have you as MY Senator. I was one of the people up here in Duluth so painstakingly recounting every vote during your original election, and was filled with pride and joy when you won, fair and square. I expected a lot from you, and you’ve exceeded my every expectation as my Senator.

So I am hoping against hope that you will find a way to rescind your resignation. I need you as my Senator. The State of Minnesota and indeed the whole United States of America need you in the Senate. Please don’t abandon us now.

Sincerely,

Laura Erickson


P.S. I sent you a fan letter back in the 90s when you were on AOL. You sent me a very nice response but it has been lost in the electricity. That is the only time I've ever encountered you in real life.

Book Review: Birds in a Cage

Five years ago, a truly exceptional nonfiction book was published in the UK about four British prisoners of war during World War II, and how their passion for birds helped them survive the horrifying conditions of the POW camps; after the war, they became important forces behind British bird conservation. Somehow, I managed to not even hear about Derek Niemann’s wonderful work, Birds in a Cage, until a few months ago, when one of my friends, Ian Paulsen, recommended it.

The book opens with a very brief overview and then introduces what Niemann calls “the cast.” Through the rest of the book, the author pretty much follows the chronology of the war, but where different men are in different locations, he goes back and forth between them. He researched the book using letters home and journals kept by the four men, so his available information provides more depth for some than others at various times. Based on the reviews on Amazon, some readers had difficulty following the book because of this. When I started out, I stuck a bookmark in that introductory section so I could go back and forth for a quick reminder of which character was which, but as it turned out, that wasn’t necessary—I quickly picked up on each one as an individual.

I knew I’d enjoy the book with the very first sentence of the first chapter:

On the day the Second World War broke out, Cheshire naturalist AW Boyd had one eye on the country diary column he was writing for the Manchester Guardian; the other he had lost on the battlefields of Gallipoli in 1915.

Niemann excerpts a bit of Boyd’s column:

I cannot help thinking that if only Hitler had been an ornithologist, he would have put off the war until the autumn bird migration was over. I wonder if any of the friendly Germans whom we met last year at the International Ornithological Congress at Rouen feel as I do. That he should force us to waste the last week of August and the first fortnight of September in a uniform that we hoped we had discarded for good is really the final outrage.

Boyd is not one of the four characters in Birds in a Cage; not only was he missing an eye but he was also in his mid-fifties when he wrote that column as the war was breaking out. By the end of the war, his ironic comment about missing the peak of the 1939 fall migration being the “final outrage” wouldn’t have seemed so humorous, especially to the four main characters of the book.

The very British ironic detachment of the opening didn’t close off author Derek Niemann from writing vividly about the harrowing conditions of the POW camps. We get plenty of details about the lice, fleas, freezing cold, malnourishment and chronic ill health of the camps, conditions so horrifying that sometimes men made a suicidal run for the barbed wire fences and razor wire in full view of the guards simply to end their own misery. One of the main characters was already suffering from dysentery, cholera, and stomach ulcers before he was even taken prisoner; in the prison camp, he became so ill that he was finally repatriated to Scotland in 1944. His death, decades later of a kidney infection, was caused by those wartime illnesses exacerbated by lack of treatment and conditions during prison life.

Even small children recognize the powerful metaphor equating birds with freedom. Whether the main characters of Birds in a Cage were marching in a frozen landscape or trapped within the barbed wire cage of a prisoner of war camp, their appreciation of the freedom of birds was far more steeped in reality than metaphor. They noticed and watched migrating rooks and jackdaws that dropped down from the skies to eat some of the prisoners’ own sewage, spread as manure on surrounding fields. They paid close attention to the little songbirds flitting in and out of the barbed wire—some of these birds became subjects of systematic studies.

Most of their observations didn’t amount to anything much after the war—indeed, John Barrett kept meticulous records in a journal—his mountains of raw data could have formed the basis of a monograph on the Eurasian Tree Sparrow, but facing an arduous long march as a refugee, he conscientiously mailed his journals to himself and the package never arrived. George Waterston’s study of the Wryneck was never published in any form either. Peter Conder’s notes on the European Goldfinch formed the nucleus of a scientific paper on the species, and most noteworthy of all, Edward Buxton’s work on the Common Redstart formed the basis for The Redstart, a major work on the subject. But whether or not the research each of them did during their imprisonment amounted to anything in the greater ornithological world, their work gave each of them a reason to look beyond the hell surrounding them. Indeed, Waterston and Buxton enlisted some of the other prisoners of war to help make observations, providing a beautiful if tiny diversion from the hell surrounding those men, too.

After the war, they each devoted their lives to something connected to birds. After writing his book about the Redstart, Buxton lived a quiet life as a respected naturalist. Barrett never again traveled from his beloved Pembrokeshire except to visit his children, yet he became the primary author of a universally praised book, The Collins Guide to the Seashore, and a noted bird teacher. Waterston became one of Scotland’s leader of conservation and came up with Operation Osprey, protecting these spectacular raptors not by keeping their whereabouts secret but by enlisting public aid by publicizing the birds. Conder became director of the RSPB, bringing the organization to a new level in professional conservation.

Even with the ability to focus on something far from the horrifying conditions of the prisoner of war camps, none of the four men in Birds in a Cage came through unscathed, in terms of both physical and psychic damage. Their story was one worth telling, and Derek Niemann did a wonderful job. I heartily recommend Birds in a Cage whether you’re interested in history, human resilience, or the importance of nature in protecting and restoring the human spirit.

Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See

One of the first books I ever read about World War II was Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist opposed to war who is drafted and becomes a chaplain’s assistant, is captured after the Battle of the Bulge and brought to to a POW camp in a vacant slaughterhouse in Dresden, the city where American firebombing killed 135,000 German men, women, and children. Like the fictional Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut and some other real-life prisoners survived the bombing, along with several German guards, deep in a cellar of that slaughterhouse.

Vonnegut writes:

Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘”Poo-tee-weet?”

The book ends as the prisoners emerged after the bombing.

And somewhere in there was springtime. The corpse mines were closed down. The soldiers all left to fight the Russians. In the suburbs, the women and children dug rifle pits. Billy and the rest of his group were locked up in the stable in the suburbs. And then, one morning, they got up to discover that the door was unlocked. World War Two in Europe was over.  

Billy and the rest wandered out onto the shady street. The trees were leafing out. There was nothing going on out there, no traffic of any kind. There was only one vehicle, an abandoned wagon drawn by two horses. The wagon was green and coffin-shaped.  

Birds were talking.  

One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, “Poo-tee-weet?”  

Birds figure in a great many fictional books about war. One reason is that birds eke out their existences apart from us humans, whether in wilderness forests or big cities or war zones. We wield ever more lethal human-designed killing technology against one another while birds try to stay alive as well as they can at the edges of the destruction, eating, sleeping, and even courting and nesting as bombs explode around them. We even take some comfort in that thought, though so many birds die as well—no one ever tallies their death toll after a massacre. The irony of Billy Pilgrim hearing that little bird singing is steeped in our deep-rooted sense of birds being missives of peace, from Noah’s dove returning with an olive branch, to the origami cranes made by Sadako Sasaki, the little girl who developed leukemia from radiation after Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima when she was two years old. She started making the cranes to symbolize peace between nations as her disease progressed. She folded her 644th paper crane before she died in 1955, when she was just 12 years old.

Last week I finished another novel about World War II, Anthony Doerr’s 2015 Pulitzer-Prize winning All the Light We Cannot See, about a young German named Werner and a blind French girl named Marie-Laure, whose paths intersect, changing both their destinies. One of the most important secondary characters, a German named Frederick who becomes Werner’s closest friend and ally, is an avid bird lover. His passion for birds becomes a metaphor for ideals so far above and apart from everything the Nazis stand for that Frederick’s very existence within the Nazi Youth, and within Germany itself, is in dire jeopardy.

I can’t even begin to recount the beauty and nuance in the gripping stories of Werner and Marie-Laure. In every way, the novel is engrossing and beautiful and tragic; for me, the story of Frederick brought the entire work to both greater depths and loftier heights. All the Light We Cannot See is one of the finest books I’ve ever read.

Tomorrow I’ll review a nonfiction book about World War II, a true account of four British prisoners of war who got through their ordeal thanks to birds.

Passport to Adventure!!

 

In 1974, when I received my first field guide for Christmas, it was like opening the Sears Christmas Catalog—what we children called the “wish book.” A whole big section showed what seemed like every toy in the world. 

My first field guide was like that—showing so many thrilling possibilities, out there waiting for me. Some of the birds pictured I’d have to travel to see in real life—ptarmigans like the ones White Fang encountered in one of my favorite children’s books, California Condors and Everglade Kites that were appearing on posters supporting the Endangered Species Act, and puffins and Roseate Spoonbills, which looked too impossibly bizarre to be real. But according to the range maps, some of the coolest looking birds could be found right near me— Common Loons, Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, Blackburnian Warblers, Pileated Woodpeckers! So many treasures, beautiful on the page, and now I could imagine seeing them in real life!

That field guide gave me the tools to identify birds, but much more important, it issued both an invitation and a personal mandate to go out and look for them. That little book was my very own Passport to Adventure.

During my first year of birding, I did manage to find in the field guide most of the birds I saw. I quickly learned that the challenge of identifying each bird could be both enjoyable and rewarding, but more importantly, I learned that the identifications were hardly ever the most enjoyable or rewarding elements of a day with birds. Indeed, sometimes it felt more rewarding to just stop and look at them, without teasing out each identification. One of the most pleasurable days of my first year of birding was spent in a railroad yard watching pigeons—seeing their muscular wings in action, drinking in their noisy takeoffs and powerful wing beats in direct flight, and thrilling at how they hold those wings in a steep V as they rock slightly back and forth in soaring flight. It was a wondrously satisfying three or four hours that I still remember with a smile.

Knowing the names of things is a primal urge for our species, referenced as long ago as Genesis, with Adam naming all the beasts and all the fowls of the air. Children quickly need a more precise word than dinosaur for Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus.

Not just ANY dinosaur--these are Stegosauruses! 

If I tell you a story about a bird and want you to be able to picture it the way it looks to me, calling it a brilliant red bird with black wings might not give you a picture of the Scarlet Tanager, Hawaiian Iiwi, or Vermilion Flycatcher I was trying to describe. The precise vividness of a name can be valuable.

Iiwi from Wikipedia by HarmonyOnPlanetEarth

You can, of course, take the precision of bird identification too far. About birds, Walt Whitman wrote:

Many I cannot name; but I do not very particularly seek information. (You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness—perhaps ignorance, credulity—helps your enjoyment of these things…)

Even if you don’t want to go beyond Whitman’s free margin, a good field guide can inspire you to go a-looking for those birds and trees and flowers. Which one should you get?

My three favorite bird field guides are the National Geographic if you want the most comprehensive guide, the Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America if you want a comprehensive North American guide that uses photos and is the one kids usually like best, and the ABA state field guides if you want a pretty comprehensive guide to just one state. I happen to have written the Minnesota one.

But just as Walt Whitman bundled birds with trees and flowers, when we go out looking for birds we see a lot of other elements of nature. One field guide is perfect for even the most advanced birder who notices other things out there as well.

The one book I recommend for every man, woman, and child in the Midwest is a field guide, but not just a field guide to birds. Even those of us who are almost exclusively focused on birds can’t help but notice some non-avian animals and plants outside, or looking up at the night sky while out owling. The Kaufman Field Guide to Nature of the Midwest makes puzzling out these features of nature simple and straightforward, enriching our outdoor experiences. If I were to recommend a single book for a nature-lover, this would be it. The Field Guide to Nature of the Midwest includes not just a great many animals and plants—it even shows the constellations in the sky.

Since it’s a pocket-sized book, it clearly cannot show all the living things of our area. Well over 400 species of birds have been seen in the Midwest, of which this guide  covers about 265 of the most common bird species. That leaves out quite a few, but the species are well chosen. I’d been an avid birder, going out daily for almost four months before I encountered the first species, Swamp Sparrow, that isn’t included in the Field Guide to Nature of the Midwest. For comparison, by that point in my birding, I’d seen 17 species that aren’t included in Stan Tekiela’s little Birds of Minnesota field guide. If you come up here to northern Minnesota for our famous owl invasions, you’ll have to recognize the Boreal and Northern Hawk Owls on your own, but it does include Gray Jay, Black-billed Magpie, Boreal Chickadee, both crossbills, and several of our other winter finches, as well as the rest of our owls.

And beyond birds, the Kaufman Field Guide to Nature of the Midwest includes fine samplings of the wildflowers, trees, other plants and fungi, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, butterflies and moths, other insects, and spiders. And each section has an inviting explanation of how to enjoy that element of nature.

If you get fascinated by a single group, as I am with birds, you’ll certainly want to add a more comprehensive field guide. For birds, the simplest choice when available for your state is one of the new ABA state field guides. In the Midwest, we have the one I wrote for Minnesota, Michael Retter’s ABA Field Guide to Birds of Illinois and Allen Chartier’s one for Michigan, which will be out very soon—it’s at the printers. Outside the Midwest, ABA now has these state field guides for Florida, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, New York, Massachusetts, the Carolinas, California, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

For an all-encompassing guide to the birds of the whole continent, if you want one with photos, I recommend the Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America, or if you prefer drawings, the National Geographic Field Guide to Birds of North America—their new 7th edition is now available, with the most up-to-date species names and taxonomic order of any guide.

But none of those bird guides will tell you what that pretty flower next to the path is, or the kind of tree that Great Horned Owl is roosting in, or what that big orange butterfly that has way too many spots for a Monarch could be.

Great Spangled Fritillary

When taking a family walk, you may prefer Whitman’s vagueness and free margin more than researching every single thing. But if you want to learn the name of a particular plant or animal to help you commit it more firmly and clearly to memory, the Kaufman Field Guide to Nature of the Midwest will provide plenty of assistance. And thumbing through it at home may fill you with the inspiration to get out there looking in the first place. It’s a true Passport to Adventure.

Mokka, the Alakef Snowy Owl

From Duluth News-Tribune

Snowy Owls are not known for their affinity to coffee, but on Wednesday, one particular Snowy Owl in Duluth had a too-close for comfort encounter with Alakef Coffee Roasters.

We’re in the midst of what scientists call an invasion or irruption year for Snowy Owls. We used to attribute these years when a great many of the owls show up in the Lower 48 to crashes in the lemming population, and most of us believed that most of the birds were starving. Duluth’s own David Evans banded Snowy Owls every year in the Duluth Harbor, and some of the individuals, in perfect health, returned several years running, so people paying attention knew that the situation was more complicated than that.

Banders can tell by a bird’s condition and weight whether it’s actually starving. The ones taken in for rehab often are in terrible condition and down to unhealthy weights, but that is often due to those birds’ injuries making it difficult for them to hunt. When you think about it, it doesn’t make sense that a bird starving in the Arctic Circle could make it all the way through the Canadian wilderness and well into the United States—it takes a lot of calories and strength to migrate at all, much less such long distances.  So during the Snowy Owl invasion in 2013-2014, Scott Weidensaul and several other bird researchers started tracking individual Snowy Owls over time by placing satellite transmitters on them in a wonderful, ongoing project called Operation SNOWstorm. Duluth’s own Frank Nicoletti has been involved in banding for the project.

So far we’ve learned that at least some of the years when owls invade, it’s because there have been so very many lemmings that reproduction was extremely successful. We’re presuming that as the birds space themselves, many of them are forced out of the Arctic by so many more experienced territorial birds. Some indeed have been found emaciated and weak, but many that are trapped by banders are robust and well filled out. Obviously, the ones that are in bad enough condition to be easily captured for rehab aren’t representative of the whole in the way that the ones trapped by banders are. And it may well be that when lemming populations crash, many more birds do head out our way. But during those years, far fewer baby Snowy Owls are hatched, and to get this far from the tundra, they still must have started in reasonably good health.

Once they get away from wilderness, they get a bit bewildered by the strange changes in habitat. One of the problems they’ve historically had in Duluth, and most certainly in other places, has been due to their preference for high places to roost, along with their equal preference for avoiding high deciduous trees, which aren’t part of their habitat in permafrost. Usually this isn’t a problem, and we often see them atop roofs, power poles, and other structures. Last week I saw one in Two Harbors sitting on a wall.

Unfortunately, sometimes something juts above rooftops that, from the air, looks stable and flat—a chimney or other kind of smokestack. On Wednesday, a Snowy Owl perched on the smokestack leading to the chaff receptacle at Duluth’s Alakef Coffee Roasters, and whoosh! Like Santa Claus, it dropped right down the chimney. Its scratching attracted the attention of Ezra Bennett, who found it, called Wildwoods Rehab, and made a YouTube video of the rescue.

Wildwoods kept the coffee-stained bird overnight and sent it on to The Raptor Center.
This story of course made the evening news. I knew it had to involve a smokestack before reporters mentioned how the bird got into the coffee-making machinery. A few decades ago, David Evans, Duluth's own prominent raptor authority, had funding to mark several birds with radio transmitters. He suddenly lost the signal of one bird, and in circling the Duluth-Superior harbor area and beyond, he finally began to pick up the signal again, but searched for two days until he finally pinpointed the bird’s location, inside an abandoned hotel. The owl had apparently fallen down the chimney. Evans got permission to go inside, and then to tear down a wall covering access to the chimney, and found the owl, still alive in a pile of dead pigeon remains, where he also found one or two dessicated Snowy Owl carcasses. When he mentioned this story at a Duluth Audubon meeting back in the late 80s or early 90s, the vice-principal of a local junior high school mentioned that a Snowy Owl had dropped down the chimney of the school, and someone else mentioned the same thing happening at their cabin.

Ezra Bennett said they’d be capping the smokestack at Alakef. That’s an important thing for all of us to do for any metal-lined chimney. Meanwhile, one thing the Snowy Owls might do next time they’re way, way up north is to talk to Santa Claus about chimneys. He can tell them how it’s easier to drop down them than to rise up again, which involves laying his finger aside of his nose—two specific pieces of human anatomy that Snowy Owls just don’t have.

Our Far-Flung Correspondents: Thanksgiving

One of the best things about being an independent producer of a radio program and podcast is hearing from listeners. I do all my work on a tiny scale, without underwriting or anyone to do PR, so I don’t have to deal with too many Russian bots or spam promotions in the comment section on my blog, and my radio and podcast listeners seem exceptionally nice and helpful. I do get more email than I know how to deal with, mostly birding listserv reports, updates from bird and conservation organizations, and spam, with some work-related stuff thrown in. I don’t often hear from listeners, and sometimes when I do, their interesting and important emails get mixed up with everything else, and I lose track of them. If you’ve sent me an email and I responded but never followed up, that’s unfortunately what happened. 

On Thanksgiving last week, I received a couple of emails from listeners that made me very thankful. Julie in Hollister, Wisconsin, sent me a great article by Patrick O’Connell in the Chicago Tribune detailing how well Sandhill Cranes are doing in the Chicago area and beyond. It notes that in the 1930s, only two dozen breeding pairs of Sandhill Cranes lived in the entire state of Wisconsin. The population in the upper Midwest is now between 65,000 and 95,000, and the increase has accelerated in the past decade.

Why are Sandhill Cranes doing so well? Wetlands recovery has been a big part of it, but the president of the International Crane Foundation, Rich Beilfuss, said, “They’ve made this existential decision to live with people, rather than avoid them.” Those of us who live in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota can’t help but appreciate that wonderful increase, too.

Along with the interesting article, Julie wrote a Thanksgiving message:

I just wanted to tell you that you are one of the things I'm grateful for.  You made our adjustment to rural WI less ? painful.  We had been coming here and owned this property for over thirty years but didn't realize how isolated we might feel actually living here.  Your voice w/your mostly uplifting stories REALLY helped us along as we really started our new adventure.  

‘Mostly uplifting’ because sometimes you share something that is hard to hear but your take on it makes me feel, well, lets see if we can work to make this better or work.

 That email left me with a warm glow, as did this one from Joni in Brandon, Florida.

Hi Laura, 

I recently discovered your podcast and it is now one of my favorites.  I appreciate your passion for and enjoyment of birds.  I also like hearing about what is going on in your life and your concerns for the environment. 

I like your most recent podcast, A November Awakening, and I agree completely about preferring standard time. 

I am blind, so I can't appreciate the visual beauty of birds, but I love birdsongs and being able to identify some birds that way. 

Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving I decided it was a good time to send you a note of thanks for all of the work you do.  Have a wonderful Thanksgiving and thanks for all the pleasure and insights you have provided via your podcast.

I seldom get around to thanking the many people who enrich my life. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a person produces a program and no one listens, does her work have any meaning?  For the Birds would be worthless without somebody out there listening; that is why I am so very grateful to you for listening.

Cardinal feeding goldfish redux

Last week on Facebook, a lot of my friends were sharing a short video, on a National Geographic webpage, of a cardinal in Illinois feeding goldfish in a backyard pond. The video had been posted on YouTube in 2010, taken during summer, when adult cardinals are feeding their own young and when some individuals molt all their head feathers—this male cardinal’s head was completely bald.


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This was news to a lot of people, but I’m old enough to remember an identical story, except for the YouTube video, from college ornithology. Our textbook, The Life of Birds, by Joel Carl Welty, which was a 2nd edition dated 1975, included a black-and-white photo of a cardinal feeding fish in a pond. It was captioned:

Sometimes the urge to feed transcends species, even class boundaries. This Cardinal was discovered feeding an adopted “brood,” of goldfish. Photo by Paul Lemmons, Shelby, N.C.

Photos from that case also popped up in other textbooks and popular books about birds. National Geographic’s own book, Song and Garden Birds from 1964 included the exact same photo published in Welty, this one captioned:

Come and get it! Hungry goldfish crowd the edge of a backyard pool in North Carolina as a cardinal passes out tidbits of food. For days the bird followed this strange routine. Alighting on the pool fence, he chirped. As the seven goldfish gathered, he fluttered down and began to feed them. In their eagerness they almost leaped from the water. Food gone, the bird flew off for more. Perhaps this foster parent had lost his own brood.

Oddly enough, National Geographic doesn’t make reference to their own publication on that YouTube video, even as they asked scientists what they thought about the more recent occurrence. One of them, Robert Mulvihill, an ornithologist at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, mentioned the earlier case, or at least that one of National Geographic Books’ competitors, the LIFE Nature Library books from the 1960s, ran a black-and-white photograph of a cardinal feeding a goldfish. Again, no one thought to look through National Geographic’s own publications.

When National Geographic asked various ornithologists, “Why would a bird feed an entirely different species,” Princeton biologist Christina Riehl had the best response.

“My best guess is that the appearance of the goldfish’s open mouth at the surface of the water is just similar enough in size and shape to the open mouth of a baby bird that it triggers the instinct in the adult bird to provide food to it,” says Riehl.

Nestlings tend to have vibrantly colored mouths, often bright red and yellow. This acts like a bull’s-eye for the parents—a visual cue that says “Feed me here! 

“It’s an amazing demonstration of how simple stimuli can trigger very hardwired behaviors, even in situations that seem obviously wrong to us,” she says.

Scientific as her words were, I return to Joel Carl Welty for the final words, which I’ve quoted many times on past For the Birds programs:

Perhaps the zenith of interspecific feeding of young is represented by a North Carolina Cardinal, Richmondena cardinalis, that was observed for several days feeding goldfish in a garden pool. As the goldfish crowded to the edge of the pool with their open mouths, the Cardinal, standing on the pool’s edge, expertly delivered mouthfuls of worms to them! One can only guess how such a strange association arose, but it seems likely that the Cardinal, bereft of its young, approached the pool to drink, and was met by gaping goldfish accustomed to being fed by humans. The two instinctive appetites, one to feed, the other to be fed, magnetically attracted each other, and a temporary, satisfying bond was set up.

Some past For the Birds programs about this. On newer programs, transcripts are usually linked on the related blog post.

• Fish Eating Birds, and One Bird Feeding Fish (1987)
• Above program re-recorded (1988)
• Above program re-recorded (2000)
• Altruism (1999)
• Better Angels (2011)

A November Awakening

There are two kinds of people, at least with regard to Daylight Saving Time. Just about all of us are on the same page in hating the twice-a-year time change. The element that divides us is which year-round time system we’d rather keep. Some prefer Standard Time—that is, setting our clocks so that noon in the center of our time zone is when the sun is most directly overhead, what the very term “high noon” is supposed to mean. Others prefer Daylight Saving Time, in which clocks are set an hour later than that.

Many bird counts, including the ones I’ve been involved in, use Standard Time for entering data. When I was counting at the Lakewood Pumping Station and at Hawk Ridge, we always called it Bird Time, because birds take no notice of human clocks. The time of sunrise changes in regular increments, earlier each day in spring, later each day in fall, and birds never make a sudden full hour jump in their daily rhythms for no good reason.

Even if I didn’t think of it as Bird Time, I’d still definitely be a year-round Standard Time person. When I was a teacher, starting in March each spring I’d go birding before school every morning. Back then, Daylight Saving Time didn’t begin until the last weekend in April, exactly when warbler migration was kicking in, and I’d sorely resent losing a full hour of birding before I had to head to work. Other people prefer that extra hour of sunlight after work, but birds aren’t so conspicuous at the end of the day.

When we finally switch back to Standard Time in November, we lose an hour of light in the afternoon, putting it back where I like it, in the morning. In fall and winter, I usually wake up between 5 and 6, make my cup of coffee while it’s still dark, and then sit with my dog Pip in my office writing or thinking as the sky changes color and birds start flying about. As days get shorter, sunrise keeps getting later.

Today, November 21, the sun rises at 7:20 here in Duluth; if we were still on Daylight Saving Time, I’d not seen the sunrise until 8:20. By then, the phone might be ringing or I might be off at an appointment. Things are just too bustling by then to enjoy my quiet alone time. No, I like my sunrises early.

This time in November, the first bird to appear in my yard, at just about sunrise, will usually be a cardinal or junco. Both seem to have good low-light vision. Chickadees and woodpeckers sleep in a little longer—maybe being within a cavity helps reduce heat loss overnight, making breakfast a little less urgent, or maybe the outside light needs to be a bit brighter to be noticeable through the entrance hole. 

Within a few minutes after sunrise, all the birds seem to be up and at ‘em. The first one I hear through tightly closed windows is usually a crow, but sometimes the local Pileated Woodpecker yells out first.

Right outside my window is a box elder with a squirrel stick nest. It's too high in the branches for me to see from my desk, but I do notice when one of my squirrels emerges from it to sit for a bit on the broken limb, just three or four feet from the windowpane. She looks out at the morning rather the way I do, except she has no cup of coffee, and she sits on the cold side of the glass. After looking every which way to verify that the coast is clear, she uses her paws and a bit of squirrel spit to wash her face, her body staying cozy under her thick furry tail.

Like birds, squirrels never think about human constructs of time. My squirrel knows that when her face is clean, it’s breakfast time. She starts down the trunk head first, her back legs hanging onto the broken limb for an extra moment as she lets go with her front legs, reaches her paws way out, and stretches. Sometimes the squirrely yoga pose lasts a moment longer, as she opens her mouth in a wide yawn. I smile. Another day has started, and all is right with the world, or at least my little corner of it.

Nongame Wildlife: Do words no longer have meaning?

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering opening up hunting on Trumpeter Swans.

In 1936, T.S. Roberts wrote that "The days of the Trumpeter Swan as a bird of Minnesota have long since passed." His research indicated that Trumpeters had formerly been found throughout the grasslands and sparsely wooded regions of the state, but were hunted until they'd been wiped out in the state “even in advance of the destruction of the Passenger Pigeon, buffalo, and antelope.” The last breeding Trumpeter Swans in Minnesota were recorded in 1883. Roberts traced all specimens labeled as Trumpeter Swans taken in the early 1900s, and sadly confirmed that every one of them was actually a Tundra Swan. According to the Minnesota Breeding Bird Atlas, "By 1932 the population was on the verge of extirpation in the entire lower 48 states. Only 69 birds remained in and near Yellowstone National Park" (near and in the Red Rock Lakes).

A few summering swans appeared in Minnesota in the early 1960s, following the 1960 release of 20 cygnets into the LaCreek National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota from the Red Rock Lakes. That gave hope that a reintroduction in Minnesota could be possible, so in 1966, what was the Hennepin County Park Reserve District tried releasing 40 Trumpeters from the Red Rock Lakes there, but the birds disappeared; attempts showed more promise a decade later when people reared cygnets in captivity for 2 years before releasing them. Birds from this project were first released in 1978, and the very next year, there was successful breeding in Minnesota. When the Minnesota DNR Nongame Wildlife program began, reintroduction of the Trumpeter Swan was one of the projects that made the chickadee checkoff for donations so successful.

This exquisite bird that had been wiped out in the state by hunters in the first place is in jeopardy even today and, tragically, its problems are still due to hunting. According to the Minnesota DNR's Trumpeter Swan Restoration Project webpage, the main cause of mortality for Trumpeters in the state is still from lead poisoning from swallowing lead shot and lead sinkers. Lead poisoning is especially prevalent during droughts, when low water levels have the birds dabbling through the muck in areas of lakes usually too deep for that, where lead shot still lurks on the bottom from long, long ago. When swallowed as grit, the swans' gizzards grind it down and send it straight into the bloodstream. Lead pellets remain on the ground or in the water like tiny time bombs—indeed, some swan poisonings have occurred on lakes where no hunting has taken place in almost a century, because ending the hunting does not magically make the shot already present disappear. Lead sinkers are the other cause of lead poisoning in Trumpeter swans.

Many hunters fought strenuously against banning lead shot for waterfowl hunting even as some hunters proposed the ban in the first place and fought strenuously for it. Enough hunters still resist any regulations about lead shot and bullets in upland habitat that it's still legal to use it despite how serious the problem of lead poisoning is for wildlife and for the hunters and their families as well. Grit-eating birds, including waterfowl feeding on grain fields, still ingest lead, and lead in gut piles and in any wounded game that eludes the hunter is still poisoning eagles and other scavengers.

The second biggest cause of swan mortality in the state is from illegal shooting, sometimes by hunters mistaking the swans for other species, a serious hunter education issue, and sometimes intentionally, by poachers and vandals. The penalty is clearly not strong enough to serve as a deterrent. One hunter who shot a Tundra Swan in Lake of the Woods faced at most a $375 fine, and no threat of losing his firearm or his hunting license.

Collisions with power lines are another issue facing the swans, and also a lack of funding, which has become a problem for the DNR in general. Right now they don't even have funding to continue battling invasive species, and the Trumpeter Swan restoration program is  not as dire a situation:

Funding for trumpeter swan restoration is an ongoing need. Minnesota's Trumpeter Swan Restoration Project is funded by the DNR Nongame Wildlife Program through donations from taxpayers to the Nongame Wildlife Checkoff on state tax forms. Additional funding comes from direct private donations.

The DNR Nongame Wildlife Program's funding via the "chickadee checkoff" on our state tax forms began in 1980. I was one of the people who tried hard to publicize the Chickadee Checkoff via my radio program. Just during the 1980s I did three programs specifically about our Trumpeter Swan reintroduction program:

• In 1987 I did a program about the Chickadee Checkoff mentioning the Trumpeter Swan among other species whose recovery it funded. 1987 radio program.
• Also in 1987 I did a program about hunters shooting swans, and how much the Nongame Wildlife Program spends per bird for their restoration. 
• In 1989, I did a program about lead poisoning in Trumpeter Swans in Minnesota, and how expensive it was for the Raptor Center to treat them. 

As one of the original projects funded by the DNR Nongame Wildlife Program, people in the state of Minnesota have had almost 40 years to internalize that indeed, swans are NONgame wildlife here in the state, and many of us have donated to the chickadee checkoff specifically to help these splendid birds. Now, as the state considers opening a hunting season on swans, many of us who donated to the NON-game Wildlife Program feel betrayed.

Of course, the Minnesota DNR Non-game Wildlife Program has already shown its disregard for the concept of NONgame wildlife by designating the Mourning Dove a game species here in 2004. Nationwide, the dove is the most heavily-harvested game bird, but hunting had been closed on it in Minnesota since 1947. In the forested northeastern part of the state, Mourning Doves are at the extreme northern limits of their range, with nowhere near enough population to support a hunt. Birds in my neck of the woods are here only because of backyard bird feeding. It's true that the Mourning Dove didn't receive any nongame funds to restore its numbers, but neither did it receive funds for game management in the state; its population is thriving thanks to agriculture and backyard bird-feeding. 

Changing the dove's designation to a game species here in Minnesota created a dangerous precedent. Duluth Audubon and I personally beseeched the DNR to prohibit hunting in the northeastern part of the state where the population is very low. And the north shore is an internationally significant hawk migration corridor where flying American Kestrels are often misidentified as doves. Hunting of several species in the state is restricted to some management areas, and this seemed very reasonable for dove hunting. The state's new Breeding Bird Atlas provides confirmation that doves are too rare in this part of the state to support a hunt. 

We also requested that as a brand new hunt, dove hunting in the state be restricted to non-lead shot. I provided citations from the annual US Fish and Wildlife Service's Mourning Dove reports to show that doves themselves suffer from exposure to lead from wasted shot, as well as information about how lead even in upland habitats was taking a toll on other species.

But the DNR went into the hearings listening ONLY to hunters who wanted the hunt; they pooh-poohed both these requests out of hand. 

When the Minnesota Non-Game Wildlife program began, a few cynics said it was a ploy to get non-hunters to donate money to bring back species that would then be designated game birds, but most of us rejected that cynicism. Unfortunately, in the case of the  Sandhill Crane, the cynics proved correct. This species was made a legal game bird in the Northwest Region of the state, the very region where it is still used to encourage people to support the Nongame Wildlife Program! 

The huge increase in Sandhill Cranes in our area was due to a huge, concerted effort led by the International Crane Foundation and several other non-profits and colleges, spearheading an annual crane count and researching the species' needs. And contributions to the DNR Nongame Wildlife Program were part of their recovery as well. 

Breeding Bird Survey shows massive increase in
 Sandhill Cranes in Minnesota.

Farmers have had some difficulties with cranes feeding on planted corn during spring, especially as the population of locally-nesting birds has increased—migrants passing through are gone from the state before planting season. Designating the crane a game species might be necessary now or in the future to manage their numbers, but that wasn't part of the DNR's rationale in changing their status, and they never held a fair and open hearing about it. Right now, there isn't any science to establish that the cranes hunted in the northwest region belong to a rapidly-expanding population. And even after several years of hunting, the DNR is still using the Sandhill Crane to encourage contributions to their Nongame Wildlife Program website. This is seriously wrong. 

Now that we're living in a world where the federal government talks about alternative facts, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that one of our state's departments would develop an alternative definition for the word nongame. But we've lost something important. Since the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed a century ago, we've had a large body of true conservationists made up of hunters and non-hunters both, with two groups of extremists, anti-hunters on one side and on the other side, poachers and "canned hunt" advocates who hate limits and regulations. As some of the state's game species have become too rare to be easily hunted, the DNR seems now to be losing their focus on restoring those species in trouble, and instead is forcing an ugly wedge between hunting and non-hunting conservationists like me who have a long history of supporting and defending the tradition of hunting and its important role in conservation, whether or not we ourselves hunt. 

Were the cynics right? Has the Nongame Wildlife Program been grabbing money from non-hunters to restore threatened species like cranes and wolves just so hunters could once again shoot them? If the Trumpeter Swan is designated a game species in the state after all the money, time, and effort non-hunting individuals and wildlife rehabbers put into restoring them and protecting them from the lead that hunters once spewed in wetlands and continue to spew in upland habitats, hunters will have squandered their reputation as conservationists. Is it time for our Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to change its name to the Minnesota Department of Game?