The Cornell Lab of Ornithology bestowed its prestigious Arthur A. Allen Award for 2013 to Dr. Robert Ridgely, at a ceremony May 14 at the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library. The award, named for Cornell Lab founder Arthur Allen, was established in 1967 to honor those who have made significant contributions to ornithology by making it accessible to the general public.

“No individual alive today has contributed more to the understanding and widespread public appreciation of South American birds than Bob Ridgely,” said Cornell Lab director John Fitzpatrick. “Through his own pioneering explorations in the Andean wilderness, his meticulously researched books and articles, and his relentless pursuit of conservation milestones in Ecuador and beyond, Bob embodies everything that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology strives to achieve and support. ”

“As founder of the Cornell Lab, Arthur Allen broke important ground by blurring the lines between amateur naturalists and professional scientists,” Fitzpatrick said. “Today we honor Allen’s vision by recognizing other leaders who help build this vital bridge, and nobody does this better than Robert Ridgely.”

Dr. Ridgely is an expert on Neotropical birds and coauthor of The Birds of Panama, The Birds of Ecuador, and The Birds of South America. Ridgely and fellow birder John Moore discovered a new species of antpitta in Ecuador in 1997.  Subsequently named the Jocotoco Antpitta, it has gangly blue legs, a white cheek patch, and vocalizations that range from a soft hooting to a sharp bark. The endangered bird was given the scientific name Grallaria ridgelyi to honor Dr. Ridgely.

Jocotoco Antpitta by Patty McGann via Wikipedia

Listen to the bird’s call and song, recorded by Dr. Ridgely in 1997. The recording is archived in the Lab’s Macaulay Library collection.

Ridgely is the cofounder and president of Fundación de Conservación Jocotoco, which runs 10 nature reserves in Ecuador. He has worked tirelessly to promote bird conservation during his tenure at the Academy of Natural Sciences and the American Bird Conservancy, continuing to the present in his role as Honorary President of the World Land Trust-US.

“Dr. Robert Ridgely is a trailblazer in conservation as well as one the world’s foremost field ornithologists and tropical researchers,” says Dr. Paul Salaman, Chief Executive Officer of World Land Trust-US. “His no-nonsense approach to conservation has resulted in the purchase of private lands for the protection of birds and their environment, producing real world results.”

Ridgely has been awarded the Eisenmann Medal by the Linnaean Society of New York (2001); the Chandler Robbins Award from the American Birding Association (2006); and the Ralph W. Schreiber Conservation Award by the American Ornithologists’ Union (2011).

Past Winners of the Arthur A. Allen Award include Roger Tory Peterson, Alexander Wetmore, Sir Peter Scott, Alexander Skutch, Tom Cade, Victor Emanuel, and Linda Macaulay.

(Image: 2013 Allen Award recipient Robert Ridgely, center, with two past recipients, Linda Macaulay and Victor Emanuel. Photo courtesy John Fitzpatrick.)

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/bith_genaro.jpg

  Bicknell's Thrushes are rare Northeastern songbirds that winter in the Caribbean.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/map_potential_550.jpg

  The entire population winters in the Caribbean, where potential habitat (green, from McFarland et al. 2013) is scarce.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/cutting_550.jpg

  Fieldworkers surveying inside Sierra de Bahoruco national park discovered extensive illegal clearings.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/map_habitat_550.jpg

  Bicknell's Thrushes live in cloud forest (red), which is threatened by agricultural expansion (yellow).

  

Surveys for a rare North American songbird are shedding light on illegal forest clearing in the Dominican Republic, according to researchers from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies and Grupo Jaragua. The ongoing cutting in Sierra de Bahoruco National Park threatens some of Hispaniola’s last remaining undisturbed cloud forest. The park’s forests are a winter home to many North American migrants, refuge for 32 endemic Hispaniolan species, and an important source of freshwater for the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The deforestation was discovered as researchers surveyed for Bicknell’s Thrushes in the national park. These small, delicately spotted birds have flutelike songs and breed in mountaintop forests from New York and New England through Quebec and Nova Scotia. The entire population spends winters in the Caribbean, mostly on Hispaniola with lesser numbers in parts of Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico.

“It’s a cruel irony that as our Grupo Jaragua colleagues conducted surveys to document where Bicknell’s Thrush occur, they ended up documenting severe habitat loss in one of the species’ important strongholds,” said Chris Rimmer, director of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. “They were literally counting thrushes while watching the cloud forest disappear.”

Because of severe population declines, Bicknell’s Thrush has been called the most threatened migrant songbird in northeastern North America and is under review for listing by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under the Endangered Species Act.

Cutting in the park has been going on since at least 2009, said Yolanda Leon of the Dominican nonprofit Grupo Jaragua. To date, an estimated 30 square miles of forest inside the park boundaries has been cleared. Surveys this winter indicated that clearing was creeping farther upslope and into the sensitive cloud forest.

“A lot of people get confused because they see a huge expanse of pine forest [higher in the park] and they say ‘Oh, the forest is fine,’” Leon said. “But we are looking at this fringe of forest that has a very specific band of occurrence, where the clouds meet the forest. It’s a very complex, beautiful forest, where you have a lot of migratory birds, and a lot of endemic birds.”

In this 2009 aerial photo, agricultural clearing along the park's southern boundary is already evident. Red dots mark locations where the survey team found ongoing clearing. Map courtesy Yolanda Leon, Grupo Jaragua.

In November 2012, Leon and two colleagues, Esteban Garrido and Jesús Almonte, found high concentrations of wintering Bicknell’s Thrushes near the regions of Las Abejas and Los Arroyos on the mountain’s southern slopes. When they returned for more surveys in the first week of April, they discovered that patches of forest had been cleared to the ground. Some had already been planted with avocado, potatoes, beets, carrots, and beans. Elsewhere, cows grazed and makeshift ovens were turning felled timber into charcoal.

Deforestation is a major problem on Hispaniola, where economic conditions force many people to clear forests to collect firewood and grow crops. However, much of the current clearing appears to be a well-funded project of several influential Dominican landowners rather than subsistence agriculture, Leon said. They have instituted a sharecropping system, encouraging Haitian immigrants to clear and farm the land in return for a small share of the harvest.

Complicating the issue is the fact that the southern boundary of the park, though it appears on maps, is not marked on the ground. “A lot of people, they don’t want to get into trouble,” Leon said. “But if they don’t see a marker… they think they are just using fallow land.”

The cloud forest is one of the most important and threatened habitat types in Hispaniola. Sierra de Bahoruco is a part of the Jaragua-Bahoruco-Enriquillo UNESCO biosphere reserve and is a center of biodiversity for birds, amphibians, orchids, and other species. Beyond Bicknell’s Thrushes, other species that depend on the park’s forests are the globally endangered Black-capped Petrel and La Selle Thrush, and more than 30 unique species such as the Hispaniolan Parrot, Hispaniolan Trogon, Hispaniolan Crossbill, and Golden Swallow (more info in a BirdLife International PDF fact sheet).

Preserving intact forest is directly important for humans, too. “The montane forest is the sponge that captures moisture from the clouds. If we don’t have these forests, there’s no freshwater for Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” said Eduardo Iñigo-Elias, who coordinates the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Neotropical Conservation Initiative. The cloud forest of the Sierra de Bahoruco, specifically, feeds the Pedernales River, which forms part of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and supplies towns in both countries.

A separate pressure on the Sierra de Bahoruco’s drier, lower-elevation forests is the harvest of a shrub called guaconejo, or torchwood (Amyris spp.). Fragrant oils contained in the bark put this plant in high demand from the perfume industry, but few sources remain outside of parks, Iñigo-Elias said. Harvesters have begun to freely infiltrate the Dominican Republic’s protected lands, cut the trees, and bring them back to Haiti to ship to France, he said.

The Ministry of the Environment in the Dominican Republic is in charge of enforcing the regulations in national parks, Iñigo-Elias said. Representatives from Grupo Jaragua and Vermont Center for Ecostudies wrote to the ministry and met with staff to describe the situation and express their support for action to curtail the illegal activities. The main goal, according to Leon, is to begin negotiations with the landowners who are underwriting the clearing to arrive at an amicable resolution that protects the park’s lands without unfairly treating the Haitian immigrants hired to do the work.

In the meantime, Grupo Jaragua has launched a Friends of the Sierra de Bahoruco Facebook page (largely in Spanish) for people who want to keep up with developments. They also hope to raise funds to conduct a land occupation study so they can help make effective conservation interventions. The Cornell Lab is a longtime research partner of both Grupo Jaragua and Vermont Center for Ecostudies, and has trained Hispaniolan biologists in mist netting, acoustic surveys, and radio telemetry, and studied threatened species such as the Black-capped Petrel, Golden Swallow, and Bicknell’s Thrush. This work has been made possible by grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to the Cornell Lab.

“This is the wintering ground for so many species that we share with the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” Iñigo-Elias said. “It’s an area of high humanitarian crisis given the lack of freshwater and the lack of fuel. And then on top of that, the last remaining resources are being cut for a few crops. I hope that all involved can come to an agreement that allows the park to do its job in protecting some of these last undisturbed remnants, and continue to provide ecosystem services to the local inhabitants.”

(Images: Bicknell’s Thrush by Pedro Genaro Rodriguez; other photos and maps by Yolanda Leon of Grupo Jaragua.)

Big Days are intense: Last year, our Team Sapsucker spent all 24 hours of April 27 scouring central and eastern Texas for birds. They had three dozen species on their list before dawn broke, and hit triple digits shortly before 8 a.m. They kept going, adding an average of one species every 11 minutes throughout the day.

To help the rest of us picture what that sort of daylong deluge of birds feels like, we’ve condensed their Big Day into a 4-minute slideshow. Watch and enjoy as the birds flash by!

Curious about which species is which in the slideshow? Refer to the table below—or download a printable PDF. (Note: the slideshow does not show all 264 species, and these photos were not taken on the Big Day itself.)

Species recorded during Big Day but not pictured in slideshow

(Photos courtesy Chris Wood and Tim Lenz.)

UPDATE 2: Owing to public interest, the Fish and Wildlife Service has extended the public comment period. If you have not already commented, you can submit comments here until April 2, 2013.

UPDATE: We received many requests from readers for information on how to submit a public comment on the proposed listing of the Gunnison Sage-Grouse. You can comment on this page anytime up to Tuesday, April 2, 2013. The page also includes links to the proposed rule (for reference) and other ways to comment. Our thanks to reader Erin Mooney for help finding this information.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued a call for public comments to inform their decision on listing the Gunnison Sage-Grouse. The deadline for comments is March 12, 2013. The following position statement was prepared by Cornell Lab director John Fitzpatrick. 

The most remarkable discovery in a century of American ornithology came in the late 1990s, when scientists described a new species: the Gunnison Sage-Grouse. Hiding in plain sight across a swath of sagebrush in southern Colorado and Utah, the species had been hunted for food by generations of pioneers and twentieth-century ranchers. Yet it took an industrious graduate student named Jessica Young to recognize that this southerly population differed substantially in size, plumage, display behavior, and voice from the Greater Sage-Grouse that lives across the remainder of the West’s vast sagebrush country. The Gunnison Basin of western Colorado was home to the new species’ largest remaining population, and so it was named for that beautiful landmark.

There was little joy in this stunning discovery, however. It was instantly recognized that this flagship of the southern sagebrush country had disappeared from most of its ancestral range because of human impacts: habitat conversion for agriculture; oil and gas development; residential development; pinyon-juniper encroachment; and effects of invasive plants such as cheatgrass. Today, the Gunnison Sage-Grouse is our choice for the most biologically endangered bird species in North America. The need for legal protection under the Endangered Species Act is urgent.

Some private landowners, including those who lease public lands from federal agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, have argued against listing Gunnison Sage-Grouse as an endangered species, and state agencies have tended to side with them. They cite the importance of voluntary conservation measures such as habitat set-asides and detailed monitoring.

Private landowners are indeed essential partners for conservation in the West, but the plight of the Gunnison Sage-Grouse now requires more than voluntary efforts. All the monitoring data, without exception, point to one unambiguous conclusion: Gunnison Sage-Grouse numbers are plummeting. Everywhere. This species is going extinct, right before our eyes. Nobody on any side of the listing debate questions the numbers—fewer than 5,000 birds. There are so few left that we essentially know where they all are, and we can count them as their numbers go down each year. Recent, prolonged drought across the western U.S. has reduced reproductive output, making matters even worse.

Today, the Gunnison Sage-Grouse is confined to seven genetically isolated populations in southern Colorado, plus one tiny population barely hanging on near Moab, Utah (see USFWS map). They are increasingly subject to the dreaded “extinction vortex”—loss of genetic variability reduces fertility and survival, which limits recruitment, thereby reducing numbers in the next generation. (The grouse’s unusual lek mating system makes them especially prone to this, because only a few males breed in any generation.) As populations become tiny, genetic variability shrinks even further, and random effects such as storms, drought, or even one especially savvy coyote, have greater and greater probability of extirpating the population entirely.

In the face of these threats, and considering that no major population is fully protected or stable—in the wild or in captivity—Gunnison Sage-Grouse must rank as the most biologically endangered bird species in all of continental North America. The only other serious candidates are California Condor, Whooping Crane, and Kirtland’s Warbler, but all three of these species are beneficiaries of copious federal spending, public-private partnerships, and captive breeding or parasite control. And they all now have steadily growing populations within large, protected landscapes.

In 2006 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to place Gunnison Sage-Grouse on the Endangered Species List. In 2010, in response to a lawsuit, the Service issued a “warranted but precluded” finding—the correct first step. We believe it is time to take the next step, as no serious biologist can escape the conclusion that this species meets all the criteria for Endangered listing under the Endangered Species Act.

Examining the facts rationally, we can reach only one conclusion in this case.

1. Efforts by public agencies and private landowners to stem the declines and stabilize local populations of Gunnison Sage-Grouse (e.g., private land easements, voluntary conservation plans, community education) have failed.
2. The Gunnison Sage-Grouse is now in imminent danger of a series of local population collapses which, when they occur, will result in extinction of the species.
3. The Endangered Species Act has repeatedly proven itself to work extremely well, especially for high-profile species that are threatened by forces we understand and can reverse.
4. Gunnison Sage-Grouse is an American emblem worthy of investment and preservation. It is a flagship for the uniquely American sagebrush ecosystem; it will stand forever as a stirring discovery of a new North American species in the modern age; and it is widely invoked as a classic example of how, under certain social and ecological conditions, evolution produces distinctive behavior and ornamentation in isolation.

Conclusion: It is now urgent that the Gunnison Sage-Grouse be listed as an Endangered Species, and that a Recovery Team be assembled and charged with fast-tracking a series of recommended steps for halting the decline and imminent extinction of this remarkable bird.

How can we make life easier for birds in our neighborhoods? That’s the question behind the latest seasonal challenge from Celebrate Urban Birds. This Cornell Lab of Ornithology citizen-scence project focuses on birds in urban settings and how they benefit from green spaces created by humans. Enter by December 15, 2012, and you could win a prize!

Several times per year the project holds contests, or “challenges” to get participants thinking about birds in their neighborhoods. Challenge entries may be photographs, artwork, video, a story, or a poem showing how birds are surviving and making use of their habitat.

“As part of this challenge, we want to see the creative or interesting ways in which people help wild birds,” says project leader Karen Purcell. “Or it could be as simple as setting up feeders or nest boxes, providing water, or planting flowers that provide seeds.”

Deadline for entries is December 15, 2012. Learn more about how you can take part.

Great prizes include feeders from challenge sponsor Kaytee, plus bird guides, sound recordings, posters, fun bird books for adults and children, and more.

How to participate:
1. Email your entry to urbanbirds@cornell.edu
2. Write your FirstName_LastName_City_State_NOBIRD in the subject line
3. Include your postal address in the body of the email
4. Please explain where the photo was taken and the name of the bird if you know it
5. Read and agree to the terms and conditions of the Challenge

See examples of current entries for this bird-inspired challenge.

Celebrate Urban Birds is a free, year-round citizen-science project focused on birds in neighborhood settings.

(Image: Cedar Waxwing by Bob Howdeshell via Celebrate Urban Birds)

Lab director John Fitzpatrick kicked things off with his argument that birds really can save the world, by capturing our imaginations and inspiring us to great things. Subsequent talks covered the contributions of citizen science to conservation policy, the enormous communicative power of high-resolution nest cameras, our unique approach to education, and more.

As a special treat, the session closed with the full Birds-of-Paradise Project lecture by Cornell Lab scientist Ed Scholes and National Geographic photographer Tim Laman. They showed some of the amazing video they collected and described the behind-the-scenes details of their eight-year project.

About 250 people attended the event, and more than a hundred viewed the event live as we streamed it online. If you missed the talks, you can watch the archived versions here. To help you navigate through the 2.5-hour video, here are the times at which each speaker begins his or her presentation:

5:34 John Fitzpatrick: Birds can save the world
22:55 Ken Rosenberg: How eBird lists affect national conservation poicy
31:00 Chris Clark: Listening to whales in a noisy ocean
43:45  Miyoko Chu: Bird Cams—Hawks, herons and other stars of the small screen
52:12 Nancy Trautmann: Connecting kids with science and nature through birds
57:53 Miyoko Chu: Merlin—Can a computer ID your bird?
1:06:30 Mike Webster: Digital ornithology
1:16:10 Gerrit Vyn: Filming the Spoon-billed Sandpiper
1:26:30 Birds-of-Paradise introductory video
1:32:15 Tim Laman and Ed Scholes: Birds-of-Paradise presentation.

Thirty-nine of the most gorgeous, outlandish animals in the world—the birds-of-paradise—live only in New Guinea, associated islands, and adjacent tropical Australia. Though they’ve been known for centuries from paintings and specimens, it’s only now that all 39 can be admired in glorious photographic detail, thanks to ground-breaking work by Cornell Lab biologist Ed Scholes and National Geographic photojournalist Tim Laman.

On October 13, Scholes and Laman gave a lecture on their work to a packed house at Cornell University. Their talk kicks off a lecture tour,  TV documentary, and museum exhibit (details and dates here) jointly developed by the Cornell Lab and National Geographic. The pair astonished the audience with stunning photos, video, and sounds of the birds, their plumage and behavior so far out of the ordinary they almost defy the imagination. The pictures are now part of a gorgeous coffee-table book (on sale Oct. 23 and available for preorder now), copublished by the two organizations. Cornell Lab writer Pat Leonard was at the lecture, and she captured the excitement in this review:

The walls of the auditorium reverberated with the hum of conversation and a sense of anticipation, punctuated by eerie recorded bird calls—just a hint of the eye-popping oddities to come. Cornell Lab biologist Ed Scholes (left, with laptop) and National Geographic photojournalist Tim Laman (right, with camera) took the stage to guide the audience through New Guinea’s remote swamps and cloud forests. Following in the footsteps of legendary explorers like Ferdinand Magellan and Alfred Russel Wallace, Tim and Ed spent 544 days in the field over 8 years, visiting 51 sites to document all 39 known species of the birds-of-paradise.  Along the way, Tim Laman shot more than 39,000 photographs. “We can’t show them all,” he quipped. By the time the evening was over, you rather wished he would have.

Tim and Ed were entertaining speakers with a tag-team style to their commentary. They described journeys to 11,000-foot mountaintops, home to the Splendid Astrapia, and to lowland swamps where the Twelve-wired Bird-of-paradise woos a female by brushing her face and throat with his long wirelike tail feathers. (Click on species’ names to see videos of them.)

Most of the remaining bird-of-paradise species inhabit the middle ground, laying claim to small slivers of territory and to unique courtship behaviors. “The males play no role in the care of the young,” Ed explained. “Their only goal is to mate with as many females as possible. So it’s the females who call the evolutionary shots.”

The more subtly beautiful females obviously have a taste for the outlandish. Over the millennia, they have chosen males with ever more iridescent colors, flashy plumes and wires, or fancy footwork. It’s “survival of the sexiest,” according to Ed. In evolutionary biology lingo, that’s “sexual selection.”

Some species put their efforts into brilliant and varied colors to get attention. The male Wilson’s Bird-of-paradise has evolved bright blue skin on its head, yellow, green, and red feathers, purple legs and feet, and two longer tail plumes that form tight outward curls. He spends his days fussily tidying his display court.

The King of Saxony Bird-of-paradise  banks on embellishment and behavior. Laughter accompanied a video clip showing him bouncing enthusiastically on a branch, making a loud crackling call, and waving long plumes that sprout from skin behind his eyes. The human equivalent, Tim pointed out, would be 10-foot appendages jutting from our temples.

Occasionally, it seems the courtship adaptations might be a bit of a nuisance. The Ribbon-tailed Astrapia’s tail is three times the length of its body. Tim and Ed said they’ve seen this bird checking for the whereabouts of its tail before taking off because its plumes sometimes get wound around trunks and branches during foraging.

The sicklebills use shapes and poses to attract attention. These “transformers” of the avian world include the Black Sicklebill who performs many wing shrugs before spreading his feathers up and over his head to create a startlingly unexpected hooded cloak (3:06 into video clip).  Tim and Ed showed the first video ever taken that captures this behavior with both sexes participating—the female going beak-to-beak with the displaying male to play her part in the mating dance.

Another favorite was the Superb Bird-of-paradise. Deftly balancing on a log, he raises special feathers that transform him into a black blob punctuated with iridescent blue markings that look rather like a wide grin and two blazing eyes. He makes a loud snapping noise to accompany his bounding dance steps around the female (at 0:55 in the video clip).

Tim and Ed made one of their most intriguing discoveries when they decided to capture the “ballerina dance” of the Wahnes’s Parotia from the female’s point of view. It took multiple cameras and two weeks of trying. Tim whiled away long hours in the blind reading The Count of Monte Cristo on an e-reader and counting the number of finger-swipes it took to finish (11,000). Looking down from a branch above the courtship display area reveals a much different view than from ground level. We see a bobbing, weaving, black ovoid shape with flashes of iridescent yellow breast feathers and a wiggling blue line that marks the back of the male’s head, highlighting his movements.

The presentation closed with a high-canopy image of the Greater Bird-of-paradise, bathed in golden morning light, taken with the ingenious “leaf-cam.” (You’ll be able to read more about it in the October issue of Living Bird, our member magazine) The bird flourishes its russet wings and its yellow and cream-colored plumes. The impenetrable rainforest spreads to the horizon. The image prompted an audible gasp from the audience and a sustained standing ovation.

Tim and Ed hope the exotic evolutionary adaptations of the birds-of-paradise will exert another kind of attraction: drawing public attention to all that could be lost if threatened rainforest habitat is not protected around the world. You can donate to support our work here.

(This article was written by Pat Leonard. Photographs by Tim Laman. The Birds-of-Paradise book and exhibition are collaborations by the Cornell Lab and National Geographic.)

Imagine you walk into the neighborhood coffee house for your morning cup of joe, and on the counter is a tip jar with a sign reading, “$ for wintering warblers” with a photo of a Chestnut-sided Warbler in a tropical forest.
You’d drop your change in, right? Any proud bird watcher would do their part for the wellbeing of the sprightly warblers that delight us so much come spring.

It’s not such a stretch of the imagination, York University researcher Bridget Stutchbury told a packed audience at the Cornell Lab’s Monday night seminar series last week. Many of the colorful songbirds that are just now leaving us for the winter, including warblers, tanagers, orioles, and grosbeaks, will spend the next five months in and around shade coffee plantations in Mexico and Central and South America.

But only if the birds can find them. Shade-coffee plantations—particularly ones that grow coffee under a natural forest canopy—are increasingly being deforested, leaving North American migrants with fewer places to spend the winter. The good news, Stutchbury said, is that you can have your dark roast and your songbirds too if you buy sustainable coffee, particularly Bird Friendly coffee.

Stutchbury recapped recent research on Wood Thrushes, sweet-singing birds of Eastern forests whose numbers have dropped by half since the 1960s. Yet, with regenerating forests in the Northeast, Wood Thrushes now have more breeding habitat than they did decades ago. “What does that tell you?” Stutchbury asked her audience. “Must be a problem on their wintering grounds.” (Although some researchers point out that the quality rather than quantity of forest in North America might still be limiting this species.)

And indeed, when Stutchbury tracked individual Wood Thrushes from the U.S. to Nicaragua and back, she found that regional Wood Thrush population declines matched deforestation trends in Nicaragua, where forest cover has dropped 30 percent in just the past two decades.

This deforestation likely affects other wintering songbirds, too, such as Baltimore Orioles and Chestnut-sided and Kentucky warblers, which have also declined in the last half-century, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey.

Can shade-grown coffee help these birds? Most coffee drinkers figure the answer is yes. But as it turns out, the words “shade-grown” on a package of coffee can refer to a range of habitat conditions that offer varying degrees of refuge for migratory songbirds.

Making Sense of Sustainable Coffee Labels
They’re those little rectangular icons lined up on your favorite gourmet coffee bags—a tree, a flower, a frog, a harvester, each trying to tell you something about how the coffee was grown. But what does each one mean, and how do they differ? Here’s a list of common labels and their benefits for birds. For more specifics, see the list of links below.

Bird Friendly. Certified by scientists from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, this coffee is organic and meets strict requirements for both the amount of shade and the type of forest in which the coffee is grown. Bird Friendly coffee farms are unique places where forest canopy and working farm merge into a single habitat. By paying a little extra and insisting on Bird Friendly coffee, you can help farmers hold out against economic pressures and continue preserving these valuable lands. The good news is that there’s more Bird Friendly coffee out there than many people realize—we just need to let retailers know we want it (see below).

Organic. As with other organic crops, certified organic coffee is grown without most synthetic pesticides and fertilizers and is fairly sustainable—although there are no criteria for shade cover. Because of coffee’s growth requirements, it’s likely that organic coffee has been grown under some kind of shade. However, many farmers shade their coffee using other crops or nonnative, heavily pruned trees that provide substantially less habitat for birds, and the organic label offers no information about this.

Rainforest Alliance. The most popular environmentally friendly certification for coffee as well as tea, cocoa, and fruits, Rainforest Alliance requires alternatives to chemical and pesticide use (though they stop short of organic certification), erosion control, restricted water use, and ecosystem management efforts. Because Rainforest Alliance develops standards for a wide range of farms, their shade-cover requirements are not as demanding as Bird Friendly coffee. Also, Rainforest Alliance allows coffee blends to be sold with the Rainforest Alliance label even if only a percentage of the beans (currently only 30 percent, with plans to scale up to 90 percent) carry the certification. Rainforest Alliance has a laudable goal to make a difference on a fairly large scale (they certified 540 million pounds of coffee in 2011), but there is no guarantee their certified coffee farms meet the wintering needs of migrant songbirds.

Fair Trade. Inspired by humanitarian concerns, Fair Trade labeling helps to ensure that the workers on coffee farms get paid fairly for the work they do. The higher prices that Fair Trade products earn help to provide an alternative to the price leverage that large coffee buyers can wield. However, a Fair Trade label does not automatically indicate that any environmentally friendly practices were followed.

Shade-grown. “Shade-grown” labels often appear on specialty coffees, but unfortunately this designation is not regulated and doesn’t tell you much about the growing conditions at the farm. When the idea for Bird Friendly coffee was hatched by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in 1996, plans for the certification process faltered while coffee companies quickly adopted the term “shade-grown” as a marketing buzzword. Unfortunately, this type of coffee can be grown among sparse trees on farms that lack diverse forest structure. Some shade-grown coffee is even grown under only the flimsy cover of banana trees fed artificial fertilizers and pesticides.

Sun-grown. Most coffee grown at an industrial scale is grown under full sun. Acres upon acres of coffee bushes planted in hedge-like rows are sustained by fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation. If a coffee brand bears no labels at all, it is likely produced with these methods and is unsustainable.

Bird Friendly Farmers Offer Half a Solution—We Can Be the Other Half
Bird Friendly certified coffee can be hard to find on store shelves and in coffee shops. One reason is that the standards for certification are so rigorous that only a small fraction of coffee farms can qualify. The total amount of Bird Friendly coffee certified in the past 12 years amounts to less than 2 percent of the Rainforest Alliance–certified coffee in 2011 alone.

But there’s another, paradoxical reason: coffee sellers don’t always advertise that their coffee is Bird Friendly. “Probably about only 10 percent of coffee from Bird Friendly certified farms carries the Bird Friendly stamp on the package,” said Robert Rice, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

For example, Starbucks and Whole Foods sell some coffee from Bird Friendly certified farms. But they don’t see the need to make room on their packaging for a separate label that appeals to a relatively small—and silent—minority: birders. And without the consumer demand and higher prices for Bird Friendly coffee, past history in Central America suggests that the market pushes coffee farmers toward partial-shade and sun-grown practices.

That’s understandable, said Stutchbury. “We can’t demand that they don’t cut down their forests, and give up money, unless we’re willing to give them something as compensation,” she said. That’s the central idea behind Bird Friendly certified coffee: paying a price premium to growers on rustic coffee plantations so that they can continue to provide prime bird habitat.

The good news is, birders can make a difference—by asking retailers to stock Bird Friendly coffee, and by buying it. Think of it as a tip jar next to your coffee maker. More than 46 million Americans say they watch birds, and half of all Americans drink coffee. “If every birder in the U.S. committed to drinking Bird Friendly coffee, the market would grow 1,000-fold,” said Bill Wilson, owner of Massachusetts-based Birds & Beans, an online coffee retailer that specializes in selling only Bird-Friendly coffee.

Stutchbury closed her talk on Monday by saying it’s time for birders to assert themselves in the coffee marketplace. “Buying Bird Friendly coffee is one of the best ways you can do your part to preserve wintering habitat for our migratory songbirds,” she said.

Where to buy Bird Friendly Coffee
Grab a supply of Bird Friendly coffee with the help of these Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center pages:

• Find a store near you
• See a map of stores that carry Bird Friendly coffee
• Order Bird Friendly coffee online

More resources on coffee and bird habitat

• For much more detail about coffee labels and their meaning visit the Coffee and Conservation blog, operated by University of Michigan biologist Julie Craves.
• Not all coffee retailers advertise that their coffee is Bird Friendly. If you’re unsure whether your favorite coffee source is Bird Friendly, you can check this list of certified Bird Friendly farms organized by country.
• The Committee for Environmental Cooperation is a joint effort by the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States. They provide background on sustainable coffee and a wealth of information and research.

(This article was written by Cornell Lab science editor Gustave Axelson. Image: Hugh Powell.)

On the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, twin spotlights once again shot into the night sky above Manhattan to offer a tribute to the men and women we lost during the 2001 attacks.

It was a clear and cool night, almost calm and with a hint of a southerly breeze. In another long-repeated annual event, thousands of birds passed over New York City on their way to winter homes in the southern U.S. and Central and South America. Cornell Lab scientist Andrew Farnsworth was on hand to count them.

Farnsworth spent the early evening until about 10:00 p.m. atop the Empire State Building and then watched from the Tribute in Light itself until 12:30 a.m. (accompanied by other birders and a Wall Street Journal reporter). In all he saw at least 2,000 birds and heard the faint chip notes of many more. He identified 28 species passing overhead and at times flying through the beams of light, where the rush of bodies looked like flurries of snow, he said.

Watching carefully with binoculars, he was able to identify a bewildering diversity of the tiny, 5-inch songbirds as they passed through the beams, recording Magnolia, Chestnut-sided, Black-and-white, and Blackpoll warblers, as well as Common Yellowthroats, Ovenbirds, Northern Waterthrushes, and 43 American Redstarts. Five male Black-throated Blue Warblers were still in such bright plumage that they “stand out like a sore thumb in the lights,” he wrote in his eBird checklist for the night. He also recorded Wood Thrushes, Swainson’s Thrushes, Veeries, Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Gray Catbirds, and Baltimore Orioles.

The lights illuminated a few larger birds as well, including a young Laughing Gull that was trying to catch insects, three Green Herons, an unidentified rail (likely a Sora)—as well as a Peregrine Falcon that made repeated hunting dives at the smaller birds. Farnsworth said he saw at least five successful attacks on warblers.

The Tribute in Light happens during a time of peak migration in the Northeast. The birds often become briefly disoriented in the lights, and most years the lights are briefly shut off throughout the night to allow circling birds to reorient themselves. This year, on a night with only moderate migrant traffic, Farnsworth saw no evidence of casualties (aside from the peregrine’s catches).

The Tribute serves as a double reminder: that city lights, when left on en masse, nationwide, for an entire migration season, take a major toll on migrating birds (see the Fatal Light Awareness Program for more); but also, of the great spectacle of bird migration that accompanies us through fall. An invisible river of animals, rivaling any scene from the Serengeti but consisting of half-ounce birds that pass quietly overhead, in the dark.

Farnsworth is a lead scientist in our BirdCast project. Its ambitious goal is to produce accurate, real-time forecasts of local migration by combining data from radar, weather conditions, and acoustic recordings of the birds’ own brief call notes, which can be identified to species. While it will be a boon to anxious birders wondering what might turn up near them (you can check predictions at the BirdCast website), BirdCast also aims to provide advance knowledge of hazardous conditions at wind turbines so they can reduce their impact on birds.

The project is still in its first year, although researchers have been applying technology to the study of migration for decades. Weather radar is good at detecting flying birds, even allowing Farnsworth to estimate the numbers of birds aloft on Tuesday night, for instance. Judging by the radar readings, he said, one cubic kilometer of New York City sky probably contained 100–200 birds at any one time on September 11. That’s not bad, according to Farnsworth, but the two previous nights had been even better, when some 600–1,000 birds filled the same volume of sky. They were audible even over city noises—cars in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, sirens, construction work—the birds’ short, sibilant call notes raining down at the rate of 3 to 5 per second at times.

Which brings up a third reminder from the Tribute in Light: if dozens of species, and thousands of birds, routinely pass over a metropolis in pitch darkness, night after night, then doesn’t that make autumn one of the most exciting times to be a bird watcher?

BirdCast is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation, and involves partners at the Cornell Lab, Microsoft, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

(Image by Greg Chow via Creative Commons.)

Writing intern Abby McBride explores the caged bird industry with help from Cornell Lab scientist Eduardo Iñigo-Elias, who coordinates our Neotropical Bird Conservation Initiative. Here’s Abby:

Environmental crime officials cracked down on wildlife trafficking between Latin America and Europe this summer, seizing more than 8,700 contraband animals in an Interpol bust dubbed Operation Cage. Authorities arrested nearly 4,000 people during raids on coastal ports, airports, post offices, markets, pet stores, and taxidermists in 32 countries. The sting focused on South and Central American birds, but it also uncovered illegally traded mammals, reptiles, fish, and insects—along with guns, ammunition, trapping equipment, and animal products such as elephant ivory.

“The trade of wild-caught birds has a long history,” said Cornell Lab biologist Eduardo Iñigo-Elias, who has studied parrot conservation and bird trafficking for the past 29 years. “It’s so difficult to trace because it’s a network—a very dynamic trade.” Iñigo-Elias works with government agencies, research institutes, and conservation organizations to combat wild bird capture. I listened with special interest because I have an exotic pet of my own: a Green-cheeked Parakeet, whose great-grandparents probably roamed the cloud forests of Bolivia, Brazil, or Argentina.

In many countries, including the United States, the only birds that can be legally sold in pet stores are ones that were hatched and raised in captivity. And it’s illegal to sell wild-caught birds from country to country, thanks to international regulations such as CITES and rules implemented after an outbreak of avian influenza in 2007. But illicit trade continues all over the world, and some bird species—like the Palm Cockatoo of Australia, a big black parrot with red cheeks and an extravagant crest—go for tens of thousands of dollars on the black market.

It’s uncertain how much wildlife trafficking goes on across the United States, but one problematic area is the state of Florida. An enforcement operation in 2006 caught smugglers importing birds into Florida from Cuba and other Caribbean islands. People are willing to pay $15,000 for a Cuban Bullfinch in Miami, Iñigo-Elias said, because the finch’s song reminds them of Cuba.

Wild bird trapping—a cultural tradition across the Caribbean—has become a problem in Florida. Iñigo-Elias has spent years combating the trade of Painted Buntings, which are captured both on their Florida breeding grounds and on their wintering grounds in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. Trappers take only the showy adult males, skewing the sex and age ratios in the population as well as reducing overall numbers. In part because of trapping and habitat degradation, the Painted Bunting population in Florida declined by 3.9 percent per year between 1966 and 2000, compared to nearly level populations in the rest of the U.S.