Round Robin

High Hopes After Smooth Test Run for the New Texas Triangle

April 23, 2012 – 7:03 pm

New science editor Gustave Axelson is staying in contact with the Sapsuckers in Texas and providing daily Facebook updates on the team’s scouting preparations leading up to Big Day. Here’s his report:

Coming in to Scout Week for Big Day 2012, the Sapsuckers were hoping a new strategy for birding a Texas Triangle—San Antonio to the Hill Country, then east to Galveston instead of Corpus Christi—would pay off with more species and a chance to break the single-day birding record.

After a test run of this new triangle over the weekend, those hopes are a little higher.

“Our biggest concern was that the Google Maps estimate was true to the actual drive time,” said Sapsucker team member Marshall Iliff. “It’s crucial that we get to the coast by late afternoon with enough time to clean up the shorebirds and get out to High Island for warblers. It will be tight, but this route should work.”

The biggest find from the test run was a Rufous-capped Warbler in the Hill Country, which the team thought they heard on Saturday, and team member Tim Lenz confirmed by zeroing in on the bird’s location on Sunday. This is a species typically found from Mexico south into Central America, with fewer than 50 records ever in Texas. Bonus birds like that could be crucial in tipping the Sapsuckers over the 264 species mark for a new North American single day birding record.

By Annetta | Posted in Big Day, Birds, travel | Comments (2)

Sensing Nature’s Beauty in Sound, Scent, and Touch

April 19, 2012 – 8:34 am

The spring 2012 issue of BirdScope recaps the Great Backyard Bird Count and takes a look at one particularly skilled set of participants. The “Michigan Bird Brains” are a youth birding team organized by teacher Donna Posont. All of the members, including Donna, are blind, yet the woods are just as full to them as they are to any of us—as Donna shows us in this lyrical essay about a summer walk along the trails of Camp Tuhsmeheta in western Michigan (click the links to hear a Macaulay Library recording of each sound):

Trees are our guideposts in the woods. Walking along the trail, tapping tree roots with our canes, we stop and feel where a Pileated Woodpecker pounded into a tree trunk looking for insects. On another tree trunk, inquisitive fingertips tell us an insect planned to reproduce by using it as a hatchery. The tree fought back by growing a protective gall around the area and radically changed those plans. That whisper-soft thump is an acorn let loose by an oak. The feel of peeling, paper-like bark lets us know we are standing beside a white birch. If one of my companions picks up a leaf, its toothy edges reveal it comes from an American elm. The balsam firs guide us to a nearby picnic pavilion.

Moving down to the lake it’s wonderful to breathe deep and take in the scent of the wild columbine blooming in June. Behind the thick undergrowth a catbird is claiming his territory. Up over the wooded hill there is an ever present chorus of Eastern Wood-Pewees, Blue Jays, Red-eyed Vireos, American Robins, and the always-delightful Black-capped Chickadees. The occasional Ovenbird is calling for the “teacher-teacher-teacher.” In the middle of it all we hear the “yanking” of the White-breasted Nuthatch, walking upside-down to find his meal. We heard a Barred Owl here recently during one of our jaunts. He didn’t stay in one spot for long, probably busy hunting for a mouse. The kids love this bird’s questioning call: Who, who cooks for you, who cooks for you now? Read More »

By Annetta | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Owl attacks Great Blue Heron at nest in darkness [video]

April 12, 2012 – 10:37 am

Twice in the last week a large owl has made nighttime attacks on the incubating Great Blue Heron at the nest outside our office. The female heron does not seem to have been injured by the attacks, which included strikes by the owl very close to the bird’s head.

The attacks were caught by our live-streaming nest camera, and we’ve put together the clips into a short video. The nest camera is very sensitive to low light levels, but even so the views of the attacking bird are brief and blurry. The large bird appears out of the blackness, approaching from below the nest and flying at full speed. It aims at the heron’s head and its momentum carries it almost into the camera. At about 1:35 in the video you can briefly see the owl perch on a branch beyond the nest. Read More »

By Hugh | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (7)

Contest: Guess When the First Hawk Egg Will Hatch!

April 11, 2012 – 6:42 pm

It’s coming up on a month since Big Red started laying eggs at our Red-tailed Hawk cam on the Cornell University campus. With an incubation time of 28-35 days, that means the first egg could hatch anytime starting this weekend—so we’re having a contest to see who can guess the time that the first chick hatches. Go here to enter your guess.

For those of you who want to get really precise with your predictions, we are going to define “hatching” as the first moment that a moderator sees the first chick’s full head clear of the egg. To win, your guess will need to be accurate to the minute—everyone who guesses the time correctly will receive a 4″ x 6″ framed photo of the hawk family. (If no one gets the correct answer to the minute, we’ll choose the person who got closest.) Enter only once per person, please. Good luck!

By Hugh | Posted in Birds, you tell us | Comments (2)

Sandpiper or plover? Or both? A field report from Chile [Video]

April 10, 2012 – 4:26 pm

In early January, two Cornell undergraduates, Andy Johnson and Hope Batcheller, visited Chile to help with some shorebird research and to gather audio and video for our Macaulay Library. One of the places they visited was the Yeso Valley, where they checked in with a research project on an unusual and declining shorebird. Here’s Andy to tell you more (be sure to read all the way down to see a gorgeous video trailer full of highlights from the trip):

On a late January evening, the sun drew its last sharp rays across the peaks encircling the Yeso Valley, and Andean Condors made their day’s last rounds. At over 8,000 feet of elevation, our alpine campsite was nestled among snow-covered peaks, some of which reached another 8,000 feet higher still.

We were just a few hours’ drive east of Chile’s smoggy capital, Santiago. But it felt a world away, because we were here to seek the company of one of the world’s most enigmatic shorebirds, the Diademed Sandpiper-Plover (Phegornis mitchelli). A small bird of muted brown and red, with a finely barred breast and bright-yellow legs, the sandpiper-plover is named for a striking white ring that adorns its dark head.

In the few days I watched them, they were often in loose pairs, probing montane streambeds and bogs with their peculiar long bills, and they frequently paused atop a cushion plant or rock, suddenly dipping their bodies forward every few seconds in a motion opposite that of a typical plover. These singular birds held a charisma that truly set them apart, in part born of their precarious existence. Read More »

By Hugh | Posted in Birds, Chile, conservation, ecology, field reports, science, slideshow, travel, Uncategorized, video | Tagged Andy Johnson, birding, Birds, birdwatching, Chile, conservation, Diademed Sandpiper-Plover, fieldwork, photos | Comments (6)

Watch Nesting Red-tailed Hawks Live on BirdCams

March 20, 2012 – 11:14 am

A new nest camera high above a Cornell University athletic field is streaming up-close views of a Red-tailed Hawk nest via the Cornell Lab’s All About Birds website. The new camera stream puts viewers 80 feet off the ground and right beside the nest, where they can watch the hawks arrive, see them taking turns incubating the eggs, and compare notes on the two birds—the male has a more golden-tawny face and is slightly smaller than the female, which has been nicknamed “Big Red” for her alma mater.

The nest should be active for at least the next two months, and we hope you’ll join us as we watch the young birds hatch and grow. The parents have raised young here for at least the last four years. They began to make brief return visits to the nest site in late January. In February we started to see them arriving with dead sticks and green pine boughs to augment the nest materials left over from last year. As signs of spring began to show the pair began spending more time at the nest, and the male started bringing prey such as squirrels and pigeons to the nest to offer the female.

Last Friday (March 16) at about 2:10 p.m., the female laid her first egg of the season, and the pair took turns incubating it over the weekend. She added a second egg on Monday (March 19), and we’re now waiting to see if they lay a third. (The typical clutch size for Red-tailed Hawks is 2–3 eggs.) It takes 28–35 days of incubation for the eggs to hatch.

To make sure no one misses out on the early stages of this Red-tailed Hawk story, we’ve put together a temporary BirdCam site where we invite you to watch these magnificent birds. Meanwhile we’re building a full-featured BirdCams site that will launch in late April. It will feature many more species, including long-running streams from our NestCams project as well as new species such as Osprey, Black Vulture, and Great Horned Owl.

(Images via BirdCams from the Red-tailed Hawk nest on Cornell University Campus. See live stream.)

By Hugh | Posted in Birds, Looks, video, what you can do | Tagged BirdCams, live, nest, Red-tailed Hawk, streaming, video | Comments (7)

New Book Tackles Old Question: Competition Between Bird Species

March 9, 2012 – 1:46 pm

How much of the world we see around us is the result of competition between species? The answer is one of the enduring debates in the field of ecology. Evolution and natural selection are founded on the idea that individuals compete to get the resources they need to survive. It happens within species all the time, but whether competition happens between members of different species has been harder to ascertain.

The question is the subject of a new book, Interspecific Competition in Birds, published by Oxford University Press. The author, André Dhondt, is the Morgens Professor of Ornithology at the Cornell Lab. In a recent conversation, he described how the book developed from his early work on two common species of tits, small European songbirds that look like colorful chickadees.

Q. For a person watching birds squabbling at feeders, it seems like competition among species happens all the time. Can you explain why that might not be proof of competition?

A. There’s a fundamental difference between competition and aggression. For an interaction to be called competition, it must have adverse effects on survival and reproduction for the individuals involved. So in order to prove the existence of competition, detailed and extensive data on survival or reproduction are required.

Some people believe that competition is so important in nature that when it occurs it will be transient. Either one of the species will disappear or the two species will evolve rapidly such that they avoid competition. This was the paradigm actually for a very long time, saying that two species that compete cannot coexist. This led to “the paradox of competition”—the idea that competition is so important that it can only rarely be observed. Read More »

By Hugh | Posted in Birds, ecology, News, science, Uncategorized | Tagged Andre Dhondt, Birds, books, competition, science | Comments (0)

Play Our Weekly Bird Quiz, Now Sponsored by Bob’s Red Mill

March 8, 2012 – 1:18 pm

One of our most popular Facebook posts each week is our bird quiz—and our new sponsor, Bob’s Red Mill, is about to make it even better. Watch the video above to hear Bob himself explain what the Bob’s Red Mill BirdSmarts Challenge is all about.

Each week we post a photo (or sometimes something trickier, like a range map) and ask people to tell us what it is. We give the answer at the end of the day, by which time typically around 250 people have submitted their opinions—sometimes even supplying detailed explanations of their rationale. Some are off base, but even those are educational, and in general we’re amazed at how quickly people converge on the correct answer. It’s partly fun, partly group learning.

And now the quiz is going to get even more educational—in the sense that it will provide direct resources to teachers and students. From now through the end of summer, as long as we can get 100 people to participate in the quiz per week, Bob’s Red Mill will donate a kit from our BirdSleuth educational program to a teacher or homeschooler. These kits contain information and activities to help students learn about science through watching and thinking about birds.

If you know of a teacher or homeschooler who would like to be entered to win one of these kits, please have them sign up by answering a few questions in this web form. The quiz will happen every Saturday during March (so it doesn’t conflict with March Migration Madness heats), and in April through September will return to its normal Tuesday slot. Thanks to everyone who already plays our weekly quiz, and we hope we’ll see even more of you on Facebook each week!

By Hugh | Posted in Birds, video, what you can do, you tell us | Comments (3)

Nominate a species for March Migration Madness!

March 6, 2012 – 10:18 am

nominate for March Migration Madness We’re almost ready to start our second season of March Migration Madness—but we need your help to pick the last four competitors.

We’re holding a tournament on our Facebook page, in which 16 of North America’s favorite birds take turns going head to head, throughout March. You can vote for your favorite, and the bird with the most Likes will go on to the next round of the tournament. Last year, the beloved Black-capped Chickadee took top honors, besting an all-star set of opponents on the way: American Robin, Downy Woodpecker, Northern Cardinal, and Cedar Waxwing all fell before the chickadee’s appeal.

This year’s tournament starts with last year’s top 8 finishers and adds four new wild cards: Bald Eagle, Yellow Warbler, Northern Mockingbird, and Snowy Owl. But that leaves four slots, and we want you to help us fill them.

Visit us on Facebook and nominate your favorite species with a post, a photo, a video, or anything else you can think of. In just one day, we’ve already had 24 species nominated—so you’re going to have to be persuasive. (You can also second someone else’s nomination by Liking their post.) Send us your nominations by March 11!

You can also sign up to receive a printable bracket that you can hang on your wall and follow the progress of the tournament. More details are in this video:

By Hugh | Posted in Birds, what you can do, you tell us | Tagged birding, Birds, birdwatching, march migration madness | Comments (130)

New Look at an Old Tradition: 10 Days of Falconry at a Middle East Festival

February 29, 2012 – 3:36 pm

Sarah MacLean didn’t know a lot about falcons when she entered an art contest sponsored by the Third International Festival of Falconry last year. All that changed when she was selected as a finalist and won a 10-day trip to the United Arab Emirates to attend the festival in December. During the trip she met falconers from many countries, and what struck her most were the ways the common demands of falconry had given rise to different cultural traditions. Here’s Sarah:

Sarah MacLean I saw my first Saker Falcon in a tent in the desert, while enjoying cardamom coffee and dates with a group of falconers from Qatar. A young boy was holding the bird on his fist as we sat on the carpet. He was eager to tell us about his horse and his saluki dog, how good they were and how many races they had won. We asked if that was his falcon as well.

“No, this is my father’s falcon,” he told us, beaming proudly, “But soon I will have my own falcon. A saqr.”

The Saker Falcon, or saqr, is a regal species in the Middle East, where falconry has been practiced for more than 6,000 years. Even more revered are the pure white Gyrfalcons, the largest and most powerful of falcons, the birds of kings. Elsewhere in the world, falconers train and hunt with raptors ranging from dove-sized accipiters to massive eagles.

My morning chat with the Qataris provided a narrow glimpse into these traditions, the full breadth of which was on display last December. Falconers from 78 nations had gathered in the United Arab Emirates for the Third International Festival of Falconry.

The birds were unforgettable. But what really struck me about my experience was both the incredible diversity of falconry and how the shared passion of the falconers united them across so many cultures. Read More »