Tag Archives | Audubon Society

New Rules Defeather Birds – Again

By Dan Greaney on August 4, 2020 in BirdWords

Great Egret in Flight

In 1896 egrets and other birds were being killed wholesale to use their feathers in women’s hats. To protest and end the slaughter, Harriet Hemenway and Minna B. Hall formed a group, the original Massachusetts Audubon Society. Within two years their movement had been replicated in fifteen other states and the District of Columbia. Another five years, and the state organizations united into the National Audubon Society.

It was an era when modern industry was young and booming, and citizens were moving from family farms to jobs in the cities. But like us, people valued the land and they recognized that its beauties and riches were not inexhaustible. So they acted to protect those natural riches. Women quickly abandoned feathered hats. In 1903 our nation created the first National WIldlife Refuge, then the National Park Service in 1916, and in 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, or MBTA.

The MBTA put into US law what the country had already agreed to with Canada, and subsequently with Mexico, Japan, and the Soviet Union. It prohibited the harming or “taking” of birds. As clarified and amended over the last century, its provisions have promoted safety and efficiency. After the Exxon Valdez killed 250,000 birds with a spill of enough oil to cover 34 acres a foot deep, the act supported fines and reparations of over $100 million, and Congress passed a requirement that oil tankers be double-hulled. When BP’s Deep Horizon spilled two to fifteen times more oil, killing over a million birds, the company paid, to date, nearly $70 billion in cleanup, fines, and lawsuit settlements that have offset the losses to habitat, residents, and businesses.

Pelican in Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

In the last two decades the act has been enforced with punitive damages only fourteen times, and for amounts that large businesses might shrug off. Even BP’s Deep Horizon payouts of $70 billion were less than .2% penalties under the MBTA. But that liability may have given teeth to the much larger public and commercial lawsuits for recovery from losses.

The act provides for waivers for various purposes including education, research, and safety. It protects only native species, and provides for game bird hunting seasons. It is hailed as our nation’s best legislation to protect birds.

But two years ago the Trump Administration gutted it. It reinterpreted the law to allow incidental take, with no waivers required and no penalties levied. “Incidental” takes are killings that happen as a by-product of actions. The new interpretation eliminates fines for misapplying pesticides that kill hundreds or thousands of birds on a single mega-farm, or for poor maintenance on an oil rig that kills a million birds or more. Every incentive to consider the well-being of birds is removed by this interpretation. Routine practices that save millions every year–covering oil waste pits, spacing power lines to avoid electrocution, replacing tower lights with blinking ones–are rendered valueless. This ruling replaces the public wealth of nature’s beauty and richness with a narrower, purely monetary value.

It has become common knowledge that birds are already in a precipitous decline. Some species like the desert-adapted ash-throated flycatcher are doing well, but overall there is a 30% loss of North American birds over the last fifty years.

Now the Administration is trying to make the interpretation that removes bird protections into permanent law. Our representative in Congress has repeatedly stated his commitment to outdoor access, but the outdoors that we can access are being impoverished. He calls efforts to protect wildlife and clean habitats “government overreach,” but given the decline of our birds it appears to be under-reach.

Now there is a bill in Congress to protect the MBTA from being demolished. Representative LaMalfa can sign on as a cosponsor to the Migratory Bird Protection Act, H.R. 5552. He can work publicly and vigorously with the Administration, his party, to get the bill enacted into law. If you, like Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall of yore, want to weigh in, Rep. LaMalfa can be reached through his form at https://lamalfa.house.gov/contact or the Redding office (530) 223-5898.

The egrets won’t thank you. But they might survive.

The Bird Escape

By Dan Greaney on May 30, 2020 in BirdWords

Killdeer on Eggs

Sometimes the garden is not quite right. Coronavirus and the other horsemen are trampling the flowers, and the misshapen economy will make next year’s seeds a stingier find. And even then, you may not be able to grow much because of climate change. Is there any help beyond Netflix and sedation?

Yes: bird-watching. It’s accessible, versatile, and beautiful. And a whole lot healthier than couch-bingeing.

But how do you start? Local Audubon activities are shut down, but the website, wintuaudubon.org, remains a rich resource. I’ll highlight a few and put them in context.

First, where can you watch birds? Since you’re at home, that can be an excellent place. If there are trees and shrubs around, then you are apt to find a variety of birds. You can put out feeders to attract them into a handy viewing area. For information on feeders and seed, click on the website’s “Attracting Birds” under the “Places to Bird” tab. For your own good viewing, or if you have children under, say nine, who can’t yet handle binoculars, then consider putting the feeders up close to a window. Window collisions are killers, but if feeders are placed within three feet of the window then slower flight speeds around the feeder make harmful collisions rare.

Of course, don’t expect the birds to be tidy. And recognize that, depending on your local traffic, it may take birds some weeks to find your feeders. But then the word will spread.

If you’re able to get outside, birding can enrich your walk. Here in the North State we have numerous parks and trails that support both wildlife viewing and physical distancing. Turtle Bay, Mary Lake, Clover Creek, and the Sacramento River Trail are among the in-town birding hotspots. Again, see the “Places to Bird” tab for more information.

You’ll need a pair of binoculars. Without them you will not see the rich colors of the birds. Fortunately, optics have improved in recent years, and excellent binoculars are available at reasonable prices–sometimes better prices than the reviews indicate. I recommend starting with the “How to Choose Your Binoculars” article under the “Get Outside/Binocular Guide” tab at audubon.org. It gives a straight scoop on quality, usefulness, and price. Then read reviews and shop.

At home or on a walk, it’s nice to be able to know what you are seeing. Scroll down the right column of the Wintu Audubon home page to find the Shasta County Bird Checklist. This printable list shows the seasonal abundance of our birds. For another useful resource, you may want to download the Merlin app, which uses the date, your location, and your answers to just a few questions to identify the bird.

Of course, bird watching is more than bird identification. Close observation can reveal what a bird eats, how it gathers its food, whether it has a nest nearby, how it is taking care of itself, or how it gets along with its neighbors. The website allaboutbirds.org can feed your understanding with species by species information about the birds.

Wintu Audubon hopes to be running programs and bird walks again this fall. In the meantime, binoculars, a field guide or online app like Merlin, perhaps a feeder, and some time let us see a world that is at least as real as the one sinking us into the couch.

Christmas Bird Counts Create a History of Information

By Dan Greaney on January 27, 2018 in BirdWords

Black-throated Gray Warbler

It’s a team sport. It’s parallel play. It’s research. It’s art. It’s an exercise in hope. It’s a long cold day outdoors!

The tradition of Christmas Bird Counts was begun by Frank Chapman in 1900. People often do things because they don’t know what else to do, and Chapman wanted to provide an alternative to the then-popular Side Hunts—Christmas Day competitions to kill and gather the biggest pile of furred and feathered animals. It was the era when John Muir was chastising Teddy Roosevelt for expressing his love of animals by shooting them, and when the Audubon Society had recently formed to dissuade people from killing egrets so their plumes could adorn ladies’ hats. The Bird Counts quickly caught on.

From that first rudimentary count in 1900, in which 25 areas from Massachusetts to Pacific Grove, CA were surveyed by 27 people to tally a total of 90 species, the annual count has grown into a massive inventory of Western Hemisphere birds. Some 75,000 people now identify and count all the birds they can in over 2500 established circles. The circles are 15 miles in diameter. The counts are held between December 14 and January 5. Good-weather years can yield 60 million birds in over 2600 species.

Locally, bird watchers conduct four Counts. The oldest, the Redding Count, was begun in 1975. It extends from Shasta College through most of Whiskeytown Lake, and from Shasta Dam down to South Bonnyview Road. Up the road, the Fall River Count was established in 1984, and is always popular as a location where valley, mountain, and Great Basin species can be found in its open fields and abundant waterways. South of Redding, the Anderson and Red Bluff Counts abut each other where the temperate Central Valley provides winter homes to numerous songbirds and waterfowl.

Together, the four counts this year hosted 81 people covering a total of 109 miles on foot, 939 miles by car, and 13 miles by kayak or canoe to tally 165 species and 75,712 individual birds.

There are always some rarities on the counts, but this year had many. In addition to a wayward swamp sparrow from the eastern US, and a handful of mute swans, who are elegant but destructively ravenous invasives, the rare birds mostly seem to reflect warm weather. Kayakers on Redding’s stretch of the Sacramento River found a black-throated gray warbler and a Hammond’s flycatcher, both of whom are expected to be sunning in Mexico this time of year. A boater in Fall River found a red-breasted merganser and a red-necked grebe, who usually winter in temperate coastal waters. A burrowing owl in Anderson, and Red Bluff’s sage thrasher and white pelican are all pushing their wintering range northward.

Perhaps the warm weather, holding some southland birds here, is also keeping many of our traditional birds away, farther north. Fall River compiler Bob Yutzy reports, “The numbers of most species were down.” Low numbers are repeated throughout the North State. Brooke McDonald’s report on the Anderson count includes “We had 18 Mallards, which is shockingly low. The average is 132 and the previous low was 81. We had 25 robins and the average is 201.”

From Red Bluff Michele Swartout reports, “We have had little precipitation so far this winter season, which meant very little to no water in our local ponds and wetlands. The lack of waterfowl, in both species and quantities was very obvious during this year’s count.”

Bill Oliver, compiler of the Redding count, sums up his findings: “The species total was a high average, but the number of [individuals] was below average, as it has been for the other local Counts.”

While the ecological disruptions of a warming climate cannot be welcome, we can hope that for now our missing North State birds are temporarily elsewhere, perhaps discovered in other counts. National Audubon is compiling the data and, if wet weather doesn’t bring the birds in sooner, will be able to let us know before long.

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Tag Archives | Audubon Society