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“Extinction Plan”: Iconic Western Bird Among Ten Species Facing A Bleak Future

By Larry Jordan on December 21, 2018 in Conservation

Yellow-billed-Cuckoo photo by Paul Sparks

Weakened Wildlife Protections May Lead to Loss of Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo

(Washington, D.C., December 18, 2018) The current Administration is on the cusp of finalizing a set of rules to weaken the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and a new report out today lists ten animals threatened by the Administration’s existing and proposed policies. The Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo, as well as the California Condor, the West Indian Manatee and other mammals, two sea turtles, an amphibian, and a rare bumble bee, are listed in the report, “Extinction Plan,” released by the Endangered Species Coalition, American Bird Conservancy, and partners.

The Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo is found in increasingly isolated patches of habitat in 12 western states, from the West Coast east to Texas. Unlike Old World cuckoos, which are nest parasites that lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, the Yellow-billed Cuckoo raises its own young, and both parents participate equally in chick-rearing.

Estimated to have a population of fewer than 2,000 individuals, the Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo was listed as a Threatened species under the ESA in 2014. But loss of nesting habitat along rivers and streams continues, even as the Administration proposes to remove the Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo from the endangered species list.

“In spite of the 2014 addition of the Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo to the ESA, no critical habitat has ever been designated to support the bird’s recovery, and the population has not had a chance to recover to a safe level,” said Steve Holmer, Vice President of Policy for American Bird Conservancy. “Meanwhile, water diversions, housing developments, and pesticide spraying on fields near breeding habitat continue to endanger the remaining birds. It is crucial that ESA protection remain in place and that critical habitat is protected or restored.”

The Administration’s proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act would affect the cuckoo and all listed species, as well as those that might require ESA listing in the future. For example, the changes would:

Make it much more difficult to protect species impacted by climate change.
Make it harder to list a new species and easier to remove those now on the list.
Make it harder to designate critical habitat for threatened and endangered wildlife.
Reduce protections for threatened species.

Although the Administration and some members of Congress have sought to weaken the Act, public opinion research indicates that the law continues to maintain broad, bipartisan public support. A 2015 poll conducted by Tulchin Research found that 90 percent of American voters across all political, regional, and demographic lines support the Endangered Species Act.

The ESA was a landmark conservation law that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support: 92-0 in the Senate, and 394-4 in the House, and signed by President Richard Nixon 45 years ago on December 28.

In 2017, American Bird Conservancy and more than 400 other organizations signed a letter to members of Congress opposing efforts to weaken the ESA, noting that the law has a 99 percent success rate and has brought back species from the Bald Eagle to the Humpback Whale. ABC’s report on the success of the ESA is available here.

Endangered Species Coalition’s member groups nominated species for the “Extinction Plan” report. A committee of distinguished scientists reviewed the nominations, and decided which species should be included. Please see the full report, along with photos and additional species information.

The Endangered Species Coalition produces a “Top 10” report annually, focusing on a different theme each year. Previous years’ reports are also available on the Coalition’s website.

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American Bird Conservancy is a non-profit organization dedicated to conserving birds and their habitats throughout the Americas. With an emphasis on achieving results and working in partnership, we take on the greatest problems facing birds today, innovating and building on rapid advancements in science to halt extinctions, protect habitats, eliminate threats, and build capacity for bird conservation. Find us on abcbirds.org, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@ABCbirds).

A Thanksgiving Celebration of the part of the bird we don’t eat

By Larry Jordan on November 24, 2018 in BirdWords

Peregrine Falcon

Bill, neb, schnoz – whatever it’s called, a bird’s beak is its second most important appendage after its wings. Since birds’ upper limbs are devoted to flight, the beak is vitally important in manipulating objects for feeding and nest building. Although some species are able to use feet for those purposes, many rely entirely on their bills.

The upper and lower mandibles comprising the beak are bony structures covered with keratin, a substance similar to human fingernails – and also similarly, constantly growing. The keratin layer may be very rigid and powerful as in the woodpeckers, whose beaks can drill nest holes or tease out insects in hardwood trees. In some species such as puffins and White Pelicans, the keratin forms projections during breeding season, presumably to enhance their attractiveness to prospective mates. These ornaments are shed after nesting time.

Icthyornis dispar

So, how did the toothed jaws of ancestral dinosaurs become transformed into modern beaks? A strong hint is offered by the recently reconstructed fossils of an ancient sea bird, Icthyornis dispar, that lived alongside dinosaurs 87 to 82 million years ago. Although it had dinosaur-like teeth, its long, narrow jaw was tipped by a tiny beak that it could have used like tweezers to grasp objects. The scientist that led the effort to reconstruct this bird said that it pecked like a bird, but bit like a dinosaur.

Red-breasted Sapsucker

Over the millennia since then, adaptation to many different foods and environments has led to the vast variety of bills seen in modern birds. Form follows function, and so we have finch and sparrow beaks that act as crackers for seed-opening; eagles with shredders to tear apart meat; woodpeckers with chisels to bore into wood for insects; hummingbird probes used to reach into flowers for nectar; heron and kingfisher spears for skewering fish or frogs; and the warblers’ tweezers for grabbing insects. Not all birds have beaks specialized for a single purpose – the omnivorous crow has a versatile beak that all by itself can be likened to a Swiss army knife.

American Crow photo courtesy of Ingrid Taylar

Most birds have little or no sense of smell, but there are notable exceptions. Vultures find the carrion they eat by odor – a characteristic taken advantage of by oil pipeline companies. By including a decay molecule in the crude oil, oil companies attract a cloud of vultures to leaks. The vultures, in turn, are followed by pipeline tenders with repair equipment. At sea, the tables are turned. Some seabirds can follow an odor plume to locate dead fish – and in this case the birds take advantage of the humans to detect fishing boats and their discards.

Generally, nostrils are on the part of birds’ beaks close to the head. However, New Zealand’s distinctive kiwi has nostrils near the tip of the beak where its well-developed sense of smell helps it find the insects and earthworms that it eats in the leaf litter.

Kiwi

The flamingo feeds in a manner as distinctive as its tropical appearance. It partially submerges its beak in prey-rich water, holding it upside down so that the upper mandible is below the lower mandible. It draws in large amounts of water and sieves out small organisms by means of hair-like projections on its beak. Thus, it is a filter-feeder, a characteristic it shares with baleen whales and oysters!

American Flamingo

Our familiar hummingbirds have tropical cousins with amazingly long or fantastically curved beaks that match the corolla tubes of the flowers they feed from. Scientists who study them think that they are partnered in an “arms race” against other flowers and birds. As the flower and the hummingbird team becomes increasingly matched to just each other, they become physiologically committed to just their unique flower-bird relationship, and they exclude other species from their activity. It is as if they are in a long process of being wedded to each other.

Anna’s Hummingbird

You don’t have to travel to exotic places or visit zoos to see these amazing beaks in action. Notice the different ways the house finches and the nuthatches that visit your feeders get into the seeds that they eat. Look at the bills of the birds in your yard – do they look like tweezers, probes or chisels? Then watch and see how the bird uses its beak. This makes another way to enjoy the birds around us.

There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills!

By Dan Greaney on October 27, 2018 in BirdWords

Golden-crowned Sparrow

Alas, it seems the miners of 160 years ago missed out on most of it. The Golden State holds so much more amber wealth and beauty than just the lustrous mineral.

Golden hues deck our world liberally, often with ephemeral but recurring glory and ache. They join with pinks and grays to brush our skies at dawn and dusk. In spring they gleam from the soft petals of poppies and the burry stripes of the bees who visit them, and the sweet honey that those two together produce; in fall, the hills and fields of dried grass, especially under sun after rain, glow goldenrod, and maples and oaks effuse geysers of leaves radiant with mustard and ochre and burnished apricot; blonde cider flows from foothill orchards, and under foothill streams trout flash their brilliance. Gold shines in the eyes of blackbirds and eagles, and in bright braids from sun-dappled rivers and lakes; and this time of year, every year, from the optimistic caps of brown little birds, like something hopeful in the miner’s pan.

Adult Golden-crowned Sparrow

Golden-crowned sparrows are mostly a camouflage of browns and grays, perfect for hiding in under-brush shadows. But like so much of life, they have their shine, too—just a modest dash of color, for them. Adults wear their golden crowns offset with a circlet of black. Young birds sport a smaller, paler spot of yellow, bordered not by black but a nondescript earth tone, like last year’s leaves. Some observers note that the pinkish bill of young birds goes gray with age, starting with the upper mandible.

First Winter Golden-crowned Sparrow

These sparrows have been northward throughout the summer months. Denizens of the west, they nested from northern British Columbia up into Alaska, as far as the Arctic Circle, where, tucked among grasses and shrubs in boggy meadows, they wove a dense cup lined with feathers or moose hair, perhaps just above spring snow but most often on the ground. They raised a clutch or two with about four eggs in each.

First Winter Golden-crowned Sparrow

Now both parents and fledglings have flown south, centering their winter range right here in northern California. They can be seen at backyard feeders, although they are generally wilder and scarcer than their racier, more numerous cousins, the white-crowned sparrows.

White-crowned Sparrow

Like many sparrows, golden-crowns have a beautiful voice. In our brushy yards and hillsides they can be heard on sunny winter mornings, singing a clear Oh, dear, me! that manages to be both woebegone and beautiful.

Studies on these birds are few, but the sparrows are part of recent measurements of mass bird migrations. Weather radar, with increasing precision, has in the last several years harvested information on not just storm clouds but on clouds of birds. The researchers report spring migrations over the US/Canada border at about 2.6 billion birds. The return trip, coming south in autumn with a new season of surviving fledglings, numbers about 4 billion.

Those nesting seasons are immeasurably valuable. They keep the gold recurring in California.

A Burning Question Beyond a Bird’s-eye View

By Dan Greaney on October 3, 2018 in BirdWords

Osprey Adult Shading Young

Something’s wrong, and the birds can’t figure it out. Day to day and year to year, it’s hotter. The birds go about their daily lives as they always have, and their days are too few, their minds too scripted, to even see that there’s a change. But they pant more. Vigor wanes, and they sing less. Rather than snuggling down to warm their eggs and chirp gently to the young inside, they stand over the eggs to shade them. Nestlings die from dehydration and heat exhaustion.

And then the fires hit. Most nestlings had already fledged this year, so at least for the mobile songbirds, and probably for most of the quail, turkeys, grouse, and roadrunners, too, escape was possible—a little by foot, and a lot by flight. Of course not all survived the firestorms, but Shasta Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation reported a single avian burn victim, a Great-horned Owl with scalded feet.

Carr Fire Burned House

Where did they fly? People who lost their homes might be able to tell you: wherever they could. But housing grows short. Even where humane values are diligently exercised there is upheaval. And birds are not particularly humane. They are birds, after all, not people.

Even with their best quail-like fellowship, they must crowd into smaller areas where there is still water to drink and vegetation to support the insects they feed on. But not all those places are seasonally ready to support them. The berries may not have ripened, and the fall salmon are not yet decaying along the riverbanks. Disease spreads more readily.

American and Lesser Goldfinches

Then comes the smoke. Most birds don’t live that long, so they may be protected from longer-term ailments like lung cancer. But like children they breathe quickly, so are probably more prone to asthma and bronchial infections, and may suffer similarly with reduced lung, heart, and brain functions.

People try to cope. We don N95 masks, or pretend we’re too rugged or bully to need them. Homeowners negotiate with insurance companies. The Chamber of Commerce and the EDC advertise business relief loans.

Birdhouse In Burn

The feathered things cope more primitively. They fly. They cannot make complex plans, or contemplate next year, or the likelihood of more heat, or the reality that their homes and livelihoods are gone up in smoke, leaving skeletons of trees and dead ash on the ground that once sustained them; or consider the years and generations following, and how the hundreds of thousands of acres burned and the millions more wilting in heat and drought will change resources for food or housing or the animal joy of singing.

Birds don’t have the capacity to grasp or modify the underlying conditions that cause suffering—to address resources with a deliberate eye to health, wildlife, a sustainable economy, climate change, and general well-being. They can’t discern the world beyond their own visceral and short-term needs. The burning question is, can we?

Eclipse of the Ducks

By Jeannette Carroll on August 25, 2018 in BirdWords

Mallard Drake in Eclipse Plumage

When most people hear the term “eclipse” they think lunar or solar. But those familiar with waterfowl understand the term might refer to the feathers, or plumage, of a duck or goose.

Mallard Female

All birds molt, a process of dropping old feathers and growing new ones. The new feathers keep the birds in good shape for flying, keeping warm, and sometimes for breeding showiness. By the end of summer the bright feathers of spring might be difficult to recognize. Many birds molt in the fall to replace worn plumage, and then again in spring to acquire their most alluring outfits.

Mallard Pair in Breeding Plumage

But waterfowl—ducks and geese—choose their mates earlier than songbirds. Ducks usually pair up by late fall, and cannot wait until spring to dress up. Male ducks, in particular, have gorgeous plumage, but in late summer all the males seem to disappear. The Sacramento River gains a steady supply of feathers floating downstream, and no male ducks are to be seen. The beautiful shining green heads of mallards vanish. The ornate wood ducks and brilliant male mergansers can’t be seen anywhere. Suddenly there seem to be many female ducks along the river, but no colorful males of these common year-round species.

Mallard Drakes in Eclipse Plumage

There’s a scientific reason. Most birds lose a few feathers at a time, replacing them piecemeal without seriously disrupting their lifestyle. But ducks shed all of their outer feathers when they molt, including their wing feathers. For a few weeks, they become flightless. Males acquire the same camouflage as the females, a useful protection while they cannot fly. An observer can distinguish a male mallard at this time only by his slightly larger body and large, yellow bill, in contrast to her orange and black bill. Males at this hapless stage tend to gather in small groups and skulk along shores with reeds and grasses, laying low until new flight feathers develop. After those new wing feathers grow back the males enter a second molt into their bright breeding plumage. The second molt is less severe, and the ducks retain their ability to fly and escape from predators. All of this happens in timely fashion—in the fall, just before the duck dating season opens.

Wood Duck Pair in Breeding Plumage

Female mallards, wood ducks, and mergansers are always attired in camouflage, so they only molt once—but again, it is in time to have fresh feathers for understated attractiveness when the males come looking.

Geese also molt in the fall, but they usually mate for life, and seem to dress for long-term health and beauty rather than for just a brief courting period. They do not molt all their wing feathers at once, so, although briefly disheveled, they retain the ability to fly.

Wood Duck Drake Preening

Ducks and geese can often be seen preening their new feathers. They have oil glands on their rumps, which supply the waterproofing that they spread over their sleek contour feathers. The feathers have small barbs that lock their parts together, and combing them helps keep the birds smooth, warm, and attractive. Waterfowl instinctively know how important their feathers are, and do the work to maintain them.

Wood Duck Pair in Eclipse Plumage

Webster defines “eclipse” as to obscure, leave out or fail. He discusses the partial or total obscuring of one celestial body by another, making one seem less brilliant, but he makes no mention of the less brilliant plumage of male ducks in the fall. Ornithologists, however, have studied the annual phenomenon extensively. Eclipse plumage allows ducks to quickly molt into fresh breeding feathers. Understanding it solves the mystery of the disappearance of the male ducks.

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Weakened Wildlife Protections May Lead to Loss of Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo