What do you know about Saw-whet Owls? If you’re like most of us, probably not much. But
these little birds are all around us, year-round, fighting out their fierce lives in our forests and
woodlands. Come learn about these neighbors from Ken Sobon, director of the Northern Saw-
whet Owl Research and Education Project in Northern California.
Ken Sobon is an avid birder, field trip leader, Vice President of Altacal Audubon Society, and is
now the Northern California representative on Audubon California board of directors. For the
past five seasons he has been the Director of the Northern Saw-whet Owl fall migration
monitoring project. In addition, Ken has been a science teacher to middle school students in
Oroville since 1995. He has shared his love of science and birding with his students both in the
classroom and in field.
Although Washington is blessed with a rich community of breeding and wintering seabirds, relatively little is known about the ecology and conservation status of many of the species, particularly the burrow-nesters. This relative lack of knowledge extends to iconic species such as the Tufted Puffin, a species recently listed as Endangered by Washington State. Moving between islands, seascapes, and species of the Outer Coast, Peter Hodum will share stories about a collaborative research program focused on improving our understanding of the ecology and conservation status of species such as the Tufted Puffin, Rhinoceros Auklet, Cassin’s Auklet and Leach’s and Fork-tailed Storm-Petrels.
Dr. Peter Hodum is an associate professor in the Biology Department and the Environmental Policy and Decision Making Program at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA, and the Chile Program Director for Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge, a conservation non-profit organization. His research focuses primarily on the conservation and ecology of threatened seabirds and island ecosystems in Chile and Washington State. His work also has a strong focus on community-based conservation, including how communities can be more effectively and authentically involved in conservation.
During this age of COVID, many of you have cancelled your birding trip to Surinam or Borneo. So maybe it is a good time to revisit some information on resident birds and our winter visitors. Mac’s presentation is a program to help refresh the minds of experienced birders, as well as provide a general introduction to those more curious about who’s hopping around in their backyard. During the course of the talk, Mac will include tips on bird identification, feeders, feathers, and a few humorous anecdotes of his almost 50 years of “birding”.
John “Mac” McCormick is a retired high school biology teacher of 37 years, and has been an avid birder since the 1970s. He is the former co-director of the San Francisco State University (SFSU) Sierra Nevada Field Station Bird Banding Program. Mac has literally handled thousands of birds during the seventeen summers he spent banding. Since his retirement in 2000, he has traveled the world, bird watching in such exotic places such as the Peruvian Amazon Basin, Brazil, Central America, Australia, and Japan.
During this presentation you’ll learn about some of the challenges that California’s locally breeding mallards face, as well as some of the novel approaches being used to help recover the declining population.
Caroline hails from New York, but has been working for CWA (California Waterfowl Association) since 2011 as the Waterfowl Programs Supervisor. Although she has conducted field work in every flyway, the Pacific is her favorite because it has such a wide variety of species, habitats, and conservation issues. California is of particular interest because while millions of birds fuel up and spend much of the fall and winter here, the state is unique in that it also hosts sizeable breeding population of locally breeding species; mallards, gadwall, cinnamon teal, wood duck. Much of the field work conducted by CWA is to evaluate conservation actions and support the hunting regulation process by providing pertinent population data; thus much of the work Caroline and her crew does involves capturing and banding birds throughout the late winter through to the fall. In her down time, she likes to explore other regions of the Flyway, using working vacations to assist colleagues at the Alaska Department of Fish & Game with various waterfowl projects.
To join our Zoom Meeting via desktop, laptop, tablet, or smart phone:
At 6:45 PM, go to the MCAS website and click the zoom link. Meeting ID: 838 3391 1815 Passcode: 110982
Want to see past meetings or brush up on your birding skills? Check out our helpful videos on the MCAS YouTube Channel.
If you stroll along the river much this winter you’ll likely see a brown bird the size of a handspan doing the same thing. But you might notice that, unlike you, it is busy poking about the shoreline for insects and crustaceans, and its hind end bobs up and down almost incessantly. The bird may stop bobbing to fly skittering away from you, low over the water’s surface, showing white wing-stripes through its gray-brown topside. This bouncing bird is the spotted sandpiper.
Now don’t expect the spotted sandpiper to have spots this time of year. Spots are a dress-up item for the breeding season, dark dots boldly decking the bird’s white breast and belly, and their brown backsides, too. For now, though, they live their lives plainly–unadorned brown and white, always over or along water, and with just their tail-bobbing to provide some flair.
Spring, however, brings more than spots to these little shorebirds. They are one of the handful of species who break the breeding pattern common to birds and large fauna in general.
Most sandpipers breed in the Far North, where the twenty-four hour sun spurs explosive growth of plants and lichens, and the hordes of insects that feed on them. Those insects are food for millions of birds, and crucial to their efforts to feed their young. That environment is rich, but only briefly so. Winter encroaches at it from both ends. To nest there, sandpipers have evolved young who develop fast. They lay large eggs; the chicks emerge precocial, ready to run and feed themselves. To guide and protect their chicks through their brief, busy childhood, parents bond for at least a season, and sometimes for multiple seasons.
But spotted sandpipers, those bobbing birds along our riverbank, have spread their nesting grounds to include not just the Far North but rivers, mountain lakes and meadows, flats and shorelines throughout Canada and most of the US. They are the most widespread sandpiper on the continent. This gives them a longer nesting season than their Arctic cousins. But the females still lay those large precocial eggs, each egg 20% of its mother’s weight. They don’t produce more than four for a single nest; the physical toll seems to be too high.
Spotted Sandpiper Nest with Eggs
To take advantage of the longer warm season, perhaps the birds could raise two broods, as many songbirds do. But nature finds many ways to solve life’s puzzles. Spotted sandpipers maximize their reproduction by having the females focus on egg-laying and the males focus on child-rearing.
At breeding season, female spotted sandpipers establish breeding territories which they vigorously defend from other females and where they court up to four males with elaborate swooping displays and strutting. Over a 6-7 week breeding season, they lay an average of eight eggs but as many as twenty, with never more than four in a nest. The total number of eggs seems to be determined by the availability of food and males. For their part, the males separately tend and protect, even from one another, their individual nests and hatchlings.
Biological changes have evolved to support this reproductive process. At breeding season, females undergo a sevenfold increase in their testosterone, promoting their active courting and territory defense. Males produce high levels of prolactin, a hormone that promotes parental care-giving.
While nature has pioneered this reproductive technique, nature does not guarantee the success of any particular strategy. Like many species, spotted sandpipers, despite being widespread, have declined over 50% in the last fifty years. What comes next for them remains unknown.
Another unknown is the function of sandpiper tail-bobbing. Guesses range from the mildly plausible – say, aiding in balancing on rough terrain – to the absurd – say, pumping body oils over their feathers to improve waterproofing. That latter reckoning is imaginative, but completely lacks physiological evidence. Since convincing explanations still elude us, the hypothesizing is wide open. Have at it!
