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Life. Death. All in the backyard.

Posted in Birds, Conservation, Environmentalism, Natural History, Seattle, United States, Washington with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on June 7, 2012 by Brendan McGarry

Feathers were strewn everywhere. Body and head asunder. Something had been eating the skull custard. A murder in my backyard.

I’d been walking my bike to the back patio of my urban home in Seattle when I’d been stopped in my tracks. A bird lay there, dead, left in the middle of the cement. Immediately my mind tore into superstitious, paranoid thoughts. Was this an ill omen? Who was the culprit? The neighbor’s cat, who roams freely, accompanying me while I tend my vegetable garden? Was I responsible because I’d not chased him away? Or was this something entirely more natural, a Cooper’s, a Sharp-shinned Hawk?

This mess was a female American Robin (Turdus migratorius). Most likely the one I’d been watching collect heaping billfulls of earthworms for nestlings nearby. I had a selfish moment of annoyance. I’d just swept the patio, now it was littered with feathers and a half eaten corpse. What a strange reaction to a gruesome death. Annoyance at the inconvenience?

Walking inside, I pondered how I should be reacting. A couple attitudes, moral directions presented themselves.

On one hand, this is just a part of life. Mortality, particularly in short-lived species like American Robins, is commonplace. Death is often apparent during the breeding season. Failed nests, naïve fledglings, there’s a reason many species have large clutches. The American Robin population is generally increasing, so certainly there was nothing to worry about. While I know these things are true, I’ve never been able to fully submit to this scientifically objective tone. I’d argue that most good biologists have emotional attachment to whatever they study and generally care more than their publications admit.

(And, I do enjoy seeing a natural predator catch prey, but that doesn’t mean I relish death.)

On the flip side is my desire to honor or rather cherish all life. Assigning values to different species seems absurd, horrible in fact. Yet we do it all the time, from valuing vegetables over weeds or killing mosquitoes while encouraging lady beetles. Life isn’t so simplistic to totally adhere to one train of thought. I’d be lying if I said that I wouldn’t be more upset if I’d found say a Cooper’s Hawk or even an American Crow dead in my yard.

However, what if I was indirectly responsible for the death of this bird? I connected the dots: petting the neighbor’s cat, encouraging it to come back, giving it an opportunity to catch this mother robin. There’s an entirely different issue here:  this cat was outdoors in the first place. Outdoor pet cats probably kill hundreds of millions of songbirds every year. This is an inflammatory issue, but you can’t ignore that fact that house cats are not natural and can have a serious impact. With an estimated 60 million pet cats in the United States alone (many of course are kept indoors), if even half are outside and kill a bird every year, that’s around 30 million birds dead of just one of many human causes*. I myself have had pet cats that went outside too.

So basically, should I be moved to tears or stoically look on as a trained scientist? As usual, I landed somewhere in the middle. There’s a good chance that if this female had a nest, it would now fail and that was a sad image; baby birds wasting away in the nest. Males do help with rearing young but it’s not typically a one bird job. Yet, as I said, American Robins are extremely common and that this was not a disaster for the species.  However, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it, humans have impacts on other species, even the common ones.

Mulling it all over I’d concluded that another bird had likely killed the robin based on the state of the corpse. The scientist in me decided that I might as well use this as learning experience, I started to do a little research on American Robins.  Maybe I could also figure out the age of the bird or something else. Time for some forensics.

Just as I had that thought, I heard the ominous rush of scavenger wings outside. Crow wings. It doesn’t take long for a mess to be cleaned up. More wingbeats and knocking on the gutters. I crept outside to watch the crow and its prize.  I wasn’t quiet enough. Flushing, it left a robin corpse in the gutter. Maybe that full crop was going to some babies. From death comes life? I continued thinking about how to approach life and death in my backyard and I heard the crow return two more times.

Inspecting my patio a half an hour later, I found no head and no body.  Somehow this resolved the issue for me.

As I stood there with feathers strewn about my feet, Bewick’s Wrens were noisily herding their shakily flighted fledglings about the yard. Death and life were spinning about, even in my urban yard.

* a few sources and extra info for those who get up in arms about cats: http://library.fws.gov/bird_publications/songbrd.html ; http://www.fws.gov/birds/mortality-fact-sheet.pdf ; http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2011/06/cats-tnr-birds-feral

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Big Day. May 5. 2012.

Posted in Big Day, Birding, Birds, Eastern Washington, Natural History, Road Tripping, Seattle, Washington with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on May 11, 2012 by Brendan McGarry

A quick note: for those of you haven’t donated yet, my big day was in support of Seattle Audubon. This money is for a general fund but continues programs like Birdwatch, the high school group I volunteer with and have blogged about. Please consider pledging to my Birdathon. Thanks so much for your support!

I woke in the confusion of deep sleep, unsure where I was. Blearily, I cast about for my glasses, brushing frost off my sleeping bag. When my brain caught up it was with a mournful reproach. What had I gotten myself into. Oh no…this was just the start of the day. This could be the intro to a horror movie.

Welcome to our big day: 12 AM on a dirt road in Wenatchee National Forest on May 5th.

Five hours later we were sitting in the car waiting for first light. Our first bird had taken nearly two hours – a Spotted Owl barking in a distant drainage. We stood watching wind push surreal globular clouds across a full moon the rest of the time. The second species in four hours, was a Northern Pygmy Owl right at dawn.

I’ll freely admit that I despise owling. Owls are indelibly special birds, species which have always held a corner of the human imagination. However, interminable hours standing in the cold, listening to air move over your ears and the gaseous irruptions of your fellow owlers, imagining distant barks, hoots, or whines, are almost never worth it. Not the best way to get excited about a big day.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, a big day is when manic birders try to see as many species of birds as possible in 24 hours. This could be in a county, a state, even a city. My expedition mates, Adam Sedgley, Micheal Willison, and I were making our go in Washington State. Adam and I were raising money for Seattle Audubon with pledges for our endeavors.

We secretly knew from the start that we wouldn’t approach the state record of 211 birds. For one we were going out a bit too early in the year for some vital species. Give or take a few weeks, May is universal big day month in North America yet early May in Washington doesn’t afford time for some neotropical migrants to arrive. Second, our route needed some fine tuning. Third, completely out of our control, was wind. A birder can never get worse luck than high winds.

A big day more or less consists of rushing about from place to place. We’d see or hear a bird, make sure everyone got on it, and rush off. This wasn’t about beautiful views or remarkable observations, it was about efficiency and tallying off species within our 24 hour frame.

We started daybreak on Bethel Ridge, which is on a random forest service road near Rimrock Lake on Highway 12. In typical dawn activity we dashed off most species we could possibly snag. Wham bam. Time to move on.

Down Umptanum road between Naches and Ellensburg, we weren’t feeling particularly enthusiastic. Aiming to hit certain habitats is key and it’s a serious issue when you miss birds with only one opportunity to see them reliably. Later in the day when we were going over species we still needed, minutes before a Red-breasted Sapsucker flew across the road I said something like “they’re easy to see flying.” I wished we’d had that kind of fortune with White-breasted Nuthatch or White-headed Woodpecker in the few Ponderosa stands visited. We were getting skunked.

Early in the game we’d adopted a strategy of running to and from the car. After finding Sage Sparrow along the Old Vantage Highway, Adam and I dashed back out of the sage, warily eyed by two geared up gentlemen on dirt bikes next to the car. They were probably used to seeing birders but were maybe a bit uneasy as to our running.

“Stop! Back up a bit……there….a bit further. It just flew. Pull forward…”

Equally so our driving probably wasn’t convincing any bystanders of our sanity. Stopping in the middle of the road or weaving to see a bird. All in all we were safe. But erratic, very erratic.

Things were not looking fantastic by mid day. Noon was literally the halfway point, we’d been up for 12 hours and would be for another 12. Sheer lunacy.

Despite feeling pessimistic I was having a surprisingly good time. That’s what big days are about. Testing yourself, in planning, in ability to pick out birds whizzing by or calling quietly, pushing your limits of sleep deprivation.

By the time the crest of the Cascades at White Pass came and went I’d already started to nod. Time was slipping by as we crossed into Southwestern Washington, hoping to scoop what we could before the sun traded places with the moon around 8:30 PM.

I’d never been to Rainbow Falls State Park but I was grateful to stretch my legs. Everything counts, even common birds (which are so often missed). Pacific Wren, Townsend’s Warbler, Pacific-slope Flycatcher, and Wilson’s Warbler were all birds I can potentially see minutes from my home in urban Seattle. Hermit Warbler however was not. Time to move on.

Desperation setting in and we saw our first gulls in a field near Roy. Luckily they were worth studying, Herring and Mew Gull represented. We were tempted to waste precious minutes to make another bird a Thayer’s. I made an unethical, silly, and unsuccessful attempt to get the bird to fly by running down the road parallel to it.

There’s a certain salvation in getting to an entirely new habitat. Suddenly coastal Washington and all its marine, intertidal species spread before us. Crunch time and we crunched much of what we’d hoped for, waterfowl, shorebirds, a few songbirds. Yet, those missed species always make you cringe.

Big days are unapologeticly crude. You eat horribly, relieve yourself in convenient, not polite, places, and largely reject courtesy. Vespertine sputtered out on a platform at the Wesport Jetty. Pelagic and Brandt’s Cormorants were our last species roosting offshore. As we scanned with flagging enthusiasm, we probably managed to ruin a man’s attempt to photograph the blood orange moon creeping over Gray’s Harbor, shaking the platform and his tripod.

153 species, 890 miles driven.  Not terrible but not great either.  Definitely fun.  The callous road trip nation easily folds into the world of birding. Maybe we could have driven further and seen more? Then again the need for dinner, rest, and the camaraderie of sharing a meal surpassed a more hours standing in the cold, hoping for owls. I wasn’t going to suggest that anyway. Like I said, I sorta hate owling.

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A Very Busy Spring

Posted in Birds, Environmentalism, Seattle, Washington with tags , , , , , , , , , , on April 5, 2012 by Brendan McGarry

Editors Note: This was written several weeks ago.  Spring is in full swing at this point.  The fact that this was composed so long ago is telling that I’ve been out and about, working and playing a lot.  This is no less telling or interesting despite the tardiness of my actual posting of it. 

Spring is here. The vernal equinox past. Suddenly the birds are singing, the flowers bloomed, and my vegetable garden flourished.

Almost.

Approximations are a rule with the natural world, that’s what keeps those of us that are deeply enamored coming back. No lines can be drawn without finding contradictions just around the bend.

At the very least, it is true that our days in the Northern Hemisphere are getting longer.

As I’m writing this, all my body is telling me to be outside. A rare March day is afoot but I’ve a resolve to get this written before I get lost in the revelry of spring sun in the Pacific Northwest.

I’ve been in my new garden all week. For the first spring in quite awhile, I’ve had the opportunity to start a vegetable garden. Some might not immediately see the connection between an urban garden and natural history but they should be considered inseparable, specifically for the urbanite.

If I were to guess at what first got my curiosity started as a child, it probably dates to crawling about the side yard of the El Segundo storefront where I spent my first years. My parents, artists, hippies, whatever you’d like to call them (I usually just call them Mom and Dad) had the good foresight to get me outside. Sure, this was urban Los Angeles, but I was getting my first taste of nature among the succulents in this small space.

Several years later, we moved to the Seattle area. My mother became a master gardener, my father and I became the labor. In those early days I found weeding and meticulously plucking slugs and cutworms off plants a chore (in fact it was, I got my allowance that way). Whether or not it was intentional, my parents’ insistence that I be outside, that I participate, garnered a deep seeded appreciation (pun intended). Like kids that have grown up on farms or in rural areas, plant life makes sense. In turn this furthers my understanding of ecosystems and especially birds.

Messing around in the garden this week I accomplished a lot in terms of getting ready to have spring vegetables, but I also enjoyed a side benefit of getting to know my new neighbors. A pair of American crows, displaying notable sexual dimorphism (the male hefty next to his mate) have started to collect sticks for their nest. Bewick’s wrens are rampant, singing all day, poking about fence lines. Holdover winter flocks of golden-crowned kinglets and brown creepers are beginning to sing during foraging efforts. American Robins are singing non-stop and getting feisty, chasing each other in the median strip in front of my house. There is no shortage of song these days.

My meager garden work finished, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to take a jaunt down to the local park. I’d been wanting to check the status of the native plants, to look for flowers and fresh foliage. So, it was off to Ravenna park.

I’ve always thought an important trait for a naturalist is forgetfulness in the face of nature. This is a theme I’ve touched on before and others, far greater than myself, have also commented on it. I’m reading Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher at the moment and have had fits of laughter in hearing these idols of mine running out of gas, losing wallets, and best of all, binoculars. We are all alike in losing track of human realities in the face of birds and landscapes. It was 4 PM before I realized I’d not eaten, had water, or done anything to satisfy bodily needs since 11 AM.

The reason being was that the forest of Cowen-Ravenna Park was awakening. In shambles from disturbance, by no means pristine, with a creek that still stinks of city runoff, there is still much to enjoy in this alleyway through the urban world of Seattle. Restoration is in full swing too, sapling cedars the most obvious of the newly planted. The creek itself runs all the way to Union Bay on Lake Washington from Green Lake, finishing adjacent to a favorite spot of birders, the Montlake Fill or the Union Bay Natural Area (natural in a primordial sense it is not). While only a section of this fragrant trickle is daylighted (1.1 km through the park), before 2006 when a project to show it the light of day was finished, it was practically hidden. Standing next to it, I have hard time believing this creek ever had salmon spawning beneath old growth timber lasting as late as the 1920s.

Disconnected from city sewage and flowing once again into Lake Washington, Ravenna Creek is a great escape for the cement weary.

Indian Plum has already made its charge into new growth, the earliest bloomer in this region and I was not surprised to see it flush with creamy pendant blooms and fresh green leaves. However, as I descended from Cowen Park, the “top” end of the creek, I saw hints of pink amongst bare branches.

“The Salmonberry is blooming!” I practically yelled in excitement.

Really, this is no surprise, just a welcome bit of color to match the vibrant birdsong. Pacific Wren trilled endlessly, a Downy Woodpecker called, and even Ruby-crowned Kinglets, not destined to nest here chortled away, flashing scarlet crowns. I always see and hear birds when I walk in the forest, it was just nice to have the yearly renewal of activity.

I listened, with the delusory hope that I’d hear something other than the Anna’s Hummingbirds buzzing about. Rufous Hummingbirds time their arrival with the blooming of Salmonberry (along with other plants). I kept this in mind, but I also was convinced that it was too early still. Taking a guess, I’d say there were probably only 10 percent of the Salmonberry blooms I’d expect in the coming weeks. Then I’d see my first Rufous. (Note: And I did) 

Along with the discarded trash that’s found a resting place in the creekbed, Skunk cabbage was flowering and leafing out. I was humbled, even in a landscape I feel a belong to, where I’ve come of age as a man and a naturalist, that I knew next to nothing about this plant. How was it pollinated? How did it propagate and spread? Getting odd looks from passersby, I squelched over to get a closer look. (In retrospect, I remembered that these plants are stinky, in this case, meaning they are pollinated by insects attracted to their stench).

Where am I going with this diatribe? I’m not really certain and I think that’s the point. One shouldn’t always have to worry about purpose or goals when enjoying the outdoors, I just had a mind to say a few things, to see a few things.

A Varied Thrush half sang from the shadowed crown of a small Western Red Cedar. I’d gone out with an eye to see things, not a checklist to fill out, and been thrilled at every turn.

Back in the garden Yellow-rumped (Audubon’s) Warblers chipped above me in the trees. Any impetuous for time outside is good in my book.

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Was it Snowpocalypse for the birds?

Posted in Birding, Birds, Natural History, Seattle, Washington with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 3, 2012 by Brendan McGarry

So it snowed a little while ago here in Seattle. We tend to make a big deal of it around these parts because snow in the Puget Sound basin, down near sea level, isn’t too common. That said people in Seattle tend overreact to snow. My parents, nervous about me driving to their home from a friend’s, made a comparison of a seven semi pileup on a mountain pass to going across town. We lose power now and then from snow laden branches falling on power lines, but in general, everyone makes it through just fine. While we sit inside our homes with plush blankets, disposable toe warmers, and insulated mugs spilling with spiked hot cocoa, I think mainly about what’s going on outside.

The bird feeder is a major center for my avian education. I remember my first feeder, brimming with sunflower seeds, suspended from a porch beam by a silvery, low gauge chain. The fragility of life was brought to my attention when a lone Pine Siskin with what appeared to be a tumor, collapsed on the deck, as if waiting for the end. I “rescued” it and resolutely watched it die in a box. Yet, when it snowed I almost always realized how tough these birds were. There was no way I could handle being out all day and night in the frigid weather but birds weighing a couple ounces were.

Stuck at home, I settled in to watch my feeders. To some of the more pragmatic of birders, a feeder might seem boring, lacking huge diversity or unique species. To me, recognizing the same individuals, understanding the various behaviors, seeing the pecking orders, and that occasional newcomer – these are essential parts of my appreciation of living creatures. Normally there’s a peak in bird attendance, essentially centered around dawn and to a lesser degree dusk. Many days I am either out of the house before light or I am catching up on sleep, missing out on the tidal flux of bird life in the yard. Thus it’s a luxury to cozy up by a window and be still.

Activity in the cold, snow or otherwise, is necessarily high. High metabolisms work hard in cold weather and even the hardy species need an almost constant stream of calories. For a photographer and a thoughtful observer, this means many more opportunities for comprehension. So, instead of being cozy inside, I was dressed to endure the weather, crouching, laying or standing as the snow settled on my shoulders and my camera.

Possibly a bit cruelly, I was taking advantage of their desperate hunger. They had to be at the feeder or finding food elsewhere. By standing nearby, I was forcing them to get over my presence, my slow, calculated movements and possibly altering their behavior enough that I wasn’t going to learn much. The Chestnut-backed Chickadees and the Red-breasted Nuthatches were vocal in their annoyance, but then again, they are nearby and lively when I fill the feeders as well. However, not until two days of posing with my camera did the sparrows come back, albeit cautiously. Fox Sparrows and Spotted Towhees would creep in and scratch away when I was absolutely still. Did I influence the survival of these birds?  Probably not.

There are some that attempt to paint feeding birds as an ethical issue. Suggesting that people shouldn’t have bird feeders because they encourage dependency or that feeding hummingbirds sugar water is somehow like supplying them with junkfood (it’s processed sugar, I’ll give them that). Maybe a few birds are killed at the feeder, either because the neighbor’s cat is outside (a far larger issue) or maybe because they strike your window, being in close proximity to your home. For the most part I dismiss worries about feeding birds. Paramount is that the educational value, the opportunities for appreciation far outweigh the potential ills. Besides, absolutely nothing is lossless. I’d wager that driving your car to go birding or hiking kills more birds than having a bird feeder does. Hummingbirds are getting essentially the same sugar they’d get from a flower and they don’t sit around and starve when you forget to fill your feeder. (Hummingbirds are a special winter issue in the Pacific Northwest because our Anna’s Hummingbirds are resident, though only recently becoming so. People feel rather possessive of their survival because we likely influenced their residency). I have no concrete proof but I’m almost certain that in the vast majority of cases, if a bird isn’t finding food at your feeder, they leave.

My favorite thing about living in proximity to mountains is that we are witness to not only latitudinal migrants but those that are altitudinal. Birds move around for all sorts of reasons, some are seasonal and some temporary. Here in Seattle, when it snows in the lowlands, it’s almost always dumping in the foothills and above. There’s a whole cohort of birds that if they had their way, would stay in the more forested and mountainous regions. So, when it snows hard, new birds show up.

Variety is the spice of life right? I’m not nearly so absolutist to believe that completely, especially in respect to the natural world. However when I saw that flash of yellow dip to my suet feeder, I was nothing but thrilled by the surprise. Our first Townsend’s Warbler had come calling.

The warbler was there for about a week. Along with the two Varied Thrushes eating seeds and suet bits on the ground (this was the first time I’d seen them do this anywhere), we had a little more color gracing the white expanse. More siskins and goldfinches dropped in from high above than normal. Yet, I was still more enamored with the Townsend’s than anything else.

Most Townsend’s Warblers head further south for California and Mexico come winter. A few decide they can stick it out in the lowlands. They join a mixed flock of chickadees, nuthatches, creepers, and kinglets. Or they find a suet feeder to get them through our generally mild winters before heading for the hills again to breed.

Standing out in the snow, snapping shot after shot of this flirtatious warbler and the more common patrons, I was struck by a number of questions. Where did the less frequent birds go when they left? They were all gone after a week. I surmised that the snow had pushed them out of their normal set of behaviors and to our yard desperate for food. Did the Varied Thrushes head back to the foothills, the forest, or were they still around, just not at our feeders? Was the Townsend’s Warbler just spending time foraging in its normal domain, higher in the conifers? There are large Douglas Firs all about my neighborhood, habitat all unto themselves and quite easily hosting a lone warbler. I hear Golden-crowned Kinglets and Brown Creepers high in the trees nearby and yet I almost never see them in the yard. (EDIT: today, while talking to my boss on the phone, I watched a Golden-crowned Kinglet bathing in a bird bath outside, brilliant crown erect like a matador’s flag).

What always sticks is that these temperate birds aren’t bowled over by the infrequent bouts of cold or snowy weather. They know how to survive all the same. Instinctual behaviors are fascinating and sometimes inexplicable. Does a Dark-eyed Junco from the Rocky Mountains know how to survive snow better than one living in or around Puget Sound? I don’t know and I haven’t found an answer in the literature. Somehow I doubt it.

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A (Photographic) Year in Review

Posted in Bird Banding, Birding, Birds, Borneo, California, Chiang Mai, Doi Inthanon, Eastern Washington, Field Work, Fire Ecology, Indonesia, Kao Yai National Park, Malaysia, Natural History, Orangutan, Oregon, Pak Thale, Plants, Road Tripping, Science, Seattle, Southeast Asia, Spoon-billed Sandpiper, Sumatra, Thailand, United States, Washington, Western Forests with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 20, 2012 by Brendan McGarry

It’s been a year since I left for an adventure in Southeast Asia. With the extremely tardy completion of a small book I made for those who supported my Kickstarter campaign for the trip, I started feeling like I’d never be on the road again. Modern expectations, the realities of money, and my desire to be a part of a stable community all seemed to be working against me, pulling me down. Yet, instead of dragging myself down the anguished path of the grounded traveler, I decided that some careful reflection was in order.

This year I’ve been a lot of places, there’s no doubt. From the temperate land I call home to the Asian tropics. To the crest of the Sierras and down to the Great Basin. Consciously or subconsciously, mountains played an undeniable role in my explorations. I was in the the shrub steppe of Steens Mountain in Oregon, the forests and alpine of Mt. Lassen in California and Mt. Rainier in Washington, the elfin evergreens of Doi Inthanon in Thailand, eruption scarred Gunung Sibayak in Sumatra, and the ancient oaks and tree ferns of Gunung Kinabalu in Borneo. In my home I wound through the high desert of interior western North America, the temperate rainforest of the Pacific Northwest coast, the snow of the Cascade range, and the mosaic of forests in the Sierra Nevada. Abroad I traipsed the lowland rainforests of Borneo and clambered about the monsoonal forests of Thailand. I drove to the summit of Doi Inthanon, the tallest mountain in Thailand, and hiked halfway up to the tallest mountain in Southeast Asia, Gunung Kinabalu.

I was captivated by small natural wonders in my own backyard (literally) and stood in awe of a bull elephant thousands of miles away. Birds were held, eyes were met with Orangutans. Animal and plant life always figure highly in my explorations, communities shaped by the landscapes I learned in my wend.

That’s the key. My excitement and passion for this world result from a desire to learn. Curiosity rules my spirit, anyone reading Wingtrip will know that.

Below I’ve compiled a long (yet also very punctuated) series of images from my year in the natural world. If you are curious about the stories behind them please ask or follow a few of the links I’ve provided above (unfortunately, through a flaw in the program I upload photos to Flickr with, literally hundreds of the photos in other entries linked to above are not visible right on wingtrip though still on Flickr – when I have time to sit down to this arduous task, it’ll be fixed). There’s so much worth working to save, these images should remind us all of that.

In short, I’ve got nothing to complain about. I hope you enjoy these shots. May you all have a fruitful year of discovery.

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Rhodostethia rosea

Posted in Birding, Birds, Eastern Washington, Environmentalism, Migration, Natural History, Road Tripping, Washington with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 17, 2012 by Brendan McGarry

Who the hell set my alarm for 3 AM?

Right. That was me.

Four hours later I was in Ephrata, Washington, doubting my sanity.

There were two cars in our caravan. Five demented birders. We had about twelve hours of driving from Seattle, Washington to Palmer Lake near Loomis, Washington and back. Where is Loomis? That’s what most people say.

A steel gray morning broke as we climbed onto the Waterville plateau, out of channels of basaltic flows that blanketed out over 4 millions years ago. When lava began to periodically sweep over the landscape millions of years before this, it was lush and wet, a polar opposite of the now arid high desert.

The sun wasn’t yet strong enough to budge the hard frost, an elegant tinsel about the trees lining the few farm houses dotting vast fields of cultivation. Agriculture reigns throughout this part of Washington like many others. We power through it and the small towns heading north. Bridgeport, Omak, Okanogan, Riverside, and finally, after almost five hours, Tonasket. Turn off to the Loomis-Oroville highway things start feeling rustic, exhilaratingly obscure.

If I’d told you we made a 10 hour drive to see one bird, would you think me crazy? Not just any bird, but a gull that without careful observation, most wouldn’t notice as particularly striking in basic (non-breeding) plumage. What about the dozens of other birders clustered around Lake Palmer squinting across the water, shivering and straining through scopes? My non-birder friends would hardly be surprised, but that doesn’t mean they get it. Yet, across the water was a gull that inspired this frenzy of driving. With a vague hue of pink, like the pale sunrise hours before, there sat a Ross’s Gull (Rhodostethia rosea), Washington’s second.

This bird is not only rare here, it is a sought after species in normal range.  This is a truly unique and superbly adapted species, exciting enough to see in its own landscape, let alone Washington. If you want to see a Ross’s Gull, typically you head to Barrow, Alaska in October for migration, or to Siberian or Northern Canadian marshy tundra during the breeding season. If you are truly demented, you could peruse the edge of arctic ice flows during winter. Spending one day with hours of driving across Washington and back, with the strong possibility of dipping on the gull, was odd. Yet, here we all were, some of the hundreds who visited the lake tucked away in the precipitous mountains of north central Washington, thousands of miles away from this bird’s home.

Named for James Clark Ross, an English naval officer who explored the arctic and the antarctic, the Ross’s Gull is monotypic (but certainly not unique in being named after a dead white man). Sole membership to the genus seems immediately appropriate when one is adorned in striking alternate (breeding) plumage. Despite their beauty, there is no accurate count of populations I’ve ever heard, or extensive information on their natural history. Territory on the edge tends to restricts our knowledge base. Their summer diet revolves around insects, abundant for the punctuated profusion of arctic summer. Winter is spent scraping by on algae and likely whatever else is found.

 

At first the atmosphere was reserved. When we arrived around 9 AM, they’d seen the bird. The deer carcass sustaining the gull’s vagrancy was still iced over; it had flown. Only certain portions of the lake were accessible or visible and there was concern that it would settle in an obscured corner. Thankfully, we didn’t have to drive the frigid lake shore for hours. The chase was fruitful.

A chase was exactly what this was. We saw the bird, watched it for about an hour, and then left. In many ways I was happy to leave. This didn’t feel organic or entirely enjoyable. Thirty birders huddled around watching one bird. Seeing it was a pleasure, how it flew and jumped above the drift ice in foraging behavior that seemed particular to a bird that winters on the edge of arctic ice. We had diagnostic views of dark underwings, a pinkish wash, a wedge shaped tail, and a small dark bill, but it never came close.

Yet something wasn’t right. Without sounding like a hermit or agoraphobic, I don’t relish this aspect of birding. Too many people vying for room, vying for attention to their ego. A crowd is still a crowd, even looking at a cool, rare bird. I didn’t need to hear the woman shouting out every little detail about the gull, as if she was announcing a horse race. I didn’t need to hear the pretentious discussions of binoculars, cameras, and trips. Too much showing off, too little reserve, appreciation, time spent learning, and ultimately, respect. Call me negative but this wasn’t what I looked for in a community. The numerous pleasurable people I spoke with were overshadowed by this miasma of obsession. I was reminded why I don’t always chase rare birds, despite admittance of enjoying adding them to my life list.

What was the point of driving all this distance, using these resources, to see a bird almost certainly destined for death far from home? This little gull had probably gotten lost, arriving here in attempts to find food. As I’ve grown older, this internal battle has raged, largely because I know the value of birding isn’t housed in vagrant species. Yet a part of me is still giddy in the chase or discovery. Some aspects of it warrant intellectual pondering, postulating on the why and how. Yet, the most benficial part of traveling to a remote locale for birding is that it can have a positive economic impact on the communities visited. Very simply, more habitat will be saved if a community sees gain in catering to nature oriented visitors. This works well around the world, a strong basis for local driven conservation efforts.

Passing through Loomis I considered all this. We’d seen other captivating things this day but had to rush by. Two ram Bighorn Sheep, crossed the road in front of us and stood veiled behind bare Douglas maples eying us from mere feet away. A deer kill, I’d guess from a Cougar (they tend to return to a kill and eat, incapable of devouring in the manner of wolves), was covered in Black-billed Magpie, Common Ravens, a young Golden Eagle, and two adult Bald Eagles. I counted a dozen Rough-legged Hawks between Palmer Lake and Seattle, wintering from the north.

The day ended with a beautiful sunset over Cle Elum and the eastern Cascades. I felt justified in having taken this trip but I still felt uneasy about aspects of it. How much of birding recklessly ignores impact in favor of valorous exploits? Does this make our pastime, in extremes or not, any better than something sneered at as explicitly impactful like say, snowmobiling? Did anyone learn anything in seeing the Ross’s Gull or did they just get their check mark?

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Discovery in the Past

Posted in Natural History, Oregon, Plants, Science, Washington on November 24, 2011 by Brendan McGarry

Nature is a highly distracting element of my life. Last week I found myself standing in the middle of a city street in Seattle. A Merlin was running loops around a plethora of irate crows, jays, flickers, and robins overhead. The person who drove up, finding me blocking the road, slack jawed, with glazed over eyes turned skyward probably thought I had mental deficiencies. They kindly refrained from honking for me to move and sat in idle until I came to.

Nature even distracts me from other nature. I can think of a particular time, seven years ago, when just that happened.

I was walking with my fellow Spring Ornithology students down a mountain road in a range of mountains adjacent Ashland, Oregon. There was an air of excitement about the group, we were finding birds new to many of us. Several hours later we saw a Great Gray Owl, plopped stately on her snag topping nest. Yet, what caught my eye and drew me away was a delicately bent lily, emblazoned by filtered afternoon light. Everyone else walked off in search of a Hermit Warbler and I suddenly no longer heard its sweet chip notes from high in the conifers above.

This plant was captivating, the light fantastic, and I bent take a shot. Facing the ground, the base of the petals and the reproductive interior of the flower were a deep magenta. I’d never seen that pigmentation in a wild plant before. Following my eye, I captured an image that still sits among my favorites.

One of the follies in attempting to capture an ecosystem with photography is that the photographer is necessarily ignorant of some aspects. I was a naturalist and a birder long before a photographer but that doesn’t cover all bases. Even when I remind myself that I need to identify everything I manage a decent shot of, it takes a tremendous amount of effort when you are starting at zero. This was most evident in my recent time in Asia. My guess is that there are many so called “conservation photographers” that still don’t have a very complex understanding of the natural world they are immortalizing despite decades of experience (that’s ok though, they still produce valuable work). I’ve photos spanning a decade which I include species I am yet to put a name to. This lily until a few weeks ago was one of them.

Fawn-lilies, trout-lilies, dog’s-tooth violet, adder’s tongue, avalanche lily. All names for the same group of plants in the genus Erythronium. Plants are even more confounding than birds when it comes to classification and naming schemes. Depending on who discovered them and what colloquialism they ascribed, you can end up with any number of names for the same group of plants. Plant classification and names appear to change even more than the elastic and dynamic rearrangement of the class Aves. The pendant like flower I knelt to photograph was most certainly a lily, I knew that at the time. I thought it’d be in my trusty Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast by Pojar and Mackkinnon, a staple for naturalists in my region.

Nope. And that was the end of it for several years.

This summer I decorated the wall of my room in the Sierras with various photos. I kept staring at this image and wondering. A summer of wondering past and back in Seattle, I asked my mother what she thought it might be. She knew it was a Erythronium, a fawn-lily, a native perennial. With small edible bulbs, they have delicate and attractive, pendulous flowers that are often early spring bloomers. After a bit of poking around in books and on the internet I figured it out: Henderson’s Fawn-lily, Erythronium hendersonii.

E. hendersonii is a fairly restricted species. In fact I was smack dab in the middle of the sole range of the plant, the Kalamath-Siskiyou mountains of Southwestern Oregon and Northwest California. While they are locally common and it’s amusingly silly, I felt a twinge of excitement in unwittingly photographing a pretty plant that was endemic to the small area I had been in (instead of it being an invasive or widespread plant). Walking through their typical habitat of open, dry woodland composed of Garry Oak and Ponderosa Pine, I’d stumbled upon a unique beauty.

The Siskiyou mountains specifically, are noted for their endemic plants and broad diversity. Wedged between the coast and the cascades with isolated peaks and a complexity of climates, it’s not hard to see how a wide variety of plants could have developed here. There is also a fair amount of serpentine that has been exposed for at least 5 million years. Soils over serpentine minerals are generally thin, poor in nutrients, a noted paucity of calcium, and rich in growth retardant, toxic elements. Serpentine plays a complex role in endemism around the world, from places like Mt. Kinabalu in Borneo and throughout California. Eventually specialized plants develop that can handle the poor soils, filling a niche and diversifying. I’ll leave it at that for serpentine, I’m no expert. The takeaway is that it’s no surprise I stumbled upon an endemic plant in these mountains.

Wait a minute though. Henderson? Who the hell was this Henderson? There’s thousands of old white men whose names are affixed to a myriad of organisms. Henderson happens to be well known for his role in Pacific Northwest botany.

Born in 1853 in Roxbury, Massachusets and attending Cornell University, he didn’t arrive out west until 1877 when he became a high school teacher in Portland, Oregon. From that point on, he started botanizing throughout much of Oregon and Washington during free time. He then successively Moved to Olympia, Washington to be a state botanist and forester and then to Moscow, Idaho as the University of Idaho’s first botanist professor, founding their herbarium.

Even after initial retirement in Hood River, Oregon in 1911 he didn’t falter in his passion for plants. He eventually became curator of the University of Oregon herbarium’s native plant collection, further enriching the existing collection. Strangely enough, he may have got this position by swimming across the Columbia River, a day before his seventieth birthday on September 8, 1923. The feat received statewide coverage and it may have caught the eye of the head of the botany department at U of O because he began a correspondence several days afterwords.  Who cares really – dude swam the Columbia river at age 70!

Not until a few years before his death did Henderson slow down. He passed in a nursing home in Puyallup, Washington in 1942 at the age of 88. His specimens number in the tens of thousands, filling the University of Washington, the Smithsonian, University of Oregon, and Oregon state herbariums, among others. Among his achievements, one of the most notable was that he was the first American botanist to explore the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, a member of the 1890 Olympic Exploring Expedition. At least sixteen species of plants have been named after him, including some I’d already known but never considered a namesake. Included in these is a favorite, Dodecatheon hendersonii, Henderson’s Shooting Star, which he and his wife Kate found on a hike east of Portland.

I discovered all this merely prompted, more than anything distracted, by this one photograph and one flower. I can now see this “grand old man of botany of the pacific northwest” slowly stepping down hillsides and through valleys, stooping to enjoy a particularly beautiful specimen just as I had done. The appreciation of nature most definitely transcends human history.

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The Boeing Creek Mystery

Posted in Birding, Environmentalism, Natural History, Seattle, Washington, Western Forests on October 15, 2011 by Brendan McGarry

The dogs charged ahead of me. Switch backing down to Boeing creek, tearing through end of summer dust, leaving me a dirt curtain to huff. The creek itself pushes eventually down to hidden lake, carrying any available urban effluvia with it. Several weeks without rain hasn’t staid the flow and the lake has warnings about high levels of potentially harmful chemicals. Moisture crept about me as I descended to the bed, following a trail of growls and barks and splashes.

Despite all the dog noise, I felt the calm of a quiet place. Set aside by William Boeing when he purchased and built his mansion here in 1913, the habitat escaped some typical developments. Relict old growth Douglas fir and western hemlock plodded the slopes through the park. I twisted by them, looking up in childish awe, following redirected water over culverts. I kicked up glacial silt which the Puget Lobe ground into hills surrounding the current day Salish Sea, our Puget Sound. Fifteen thousand years ago, there would have been at least a couple thousand feet of ice over my head. A river would have been where the sound was before the continental ice sheet intruded and carved out the contemporary topography.

Lost in thought, enjoying lime sunlight filtered through devil’s club leaves, I realized I’d not heard the dogs in awhile. You may have misgivings about my dogs being off leash in a park. Sometimes I do too. Yet, there are greater evils in the world to worry about than dogs running loose in a half-wild city park. I agree with leashing dogs in true wilderness, but I enjoy the happy freedom of walking trails here with them bounding ahead. That said, they occasionally get into trouble, in the form of things not intended for consumption or things rubbed into fur that clashed with human olfactory sensitivities. When there wasn’t barking or jingling tags, I became worried.

Behind an indian plum, beneath a western red cedar, the dogs stood still snuffling. Something had caught their interest. Their noses directed at a pile of feathers. My first concern was that they’d killed something. However, sticks had been crossed atop a splayed corpse, alleviating my fears but also piquing my curiosity.

“Get. Go on, get. Lobo. Lilly. Get.”

Subservient glances, dropped wagging tails and ears, unsure backing away. I’d caught them before they’d rolled in whatever it was. Flies were swarming, their larvae writhed over dusky, brown and tan mottled feathers. Prodding with a stick, I uncovered identity. This wasn’t just any dead bird my canid friends had found, this was a great-horned owl (bubo virginianus).

How did it get here?

My extensive forensic training told me at least one thing, someone else had found this bird and put sticks over it, likely to deter future dog investigators. Another thing was obvious, this wasn’t a fresh kill. The body was slumped, pungent with decay, feathers soiled in rancid grease. It was in such a low, enclosed area that I could hardly see it having sat there in a weakened state, died, and fell to the ground.

Quite the mystery.

Did a person kill it? Was it sick?

I’ve got a theory. There’s been barred owls about the park. While I wasn’t around for their breeding season, I have reason to believe that they did breed there, based off what my parents told me. Barred owls can be extremely aggressive and while I’ve never heard of one killing a great-horned owl, I wouldn’t put it past them.

I’ll never really know. Yet, I like that it highlights how much nature can be in a small city park (at least two species of owls!).

 

Surreptitiously scooping up the body into a bag (to take to the Burke Museum or Seattle Audubon), I walked down to Hidden Lake. In November, bufflehead join the constant flock of mallards here. Stern warnings kept Lilly from trying to catch mallards in eclipse plumage, lacking flight to properly escape.

Sword ferns crashed aside as the dogs skittered up the hill, away from the lake. Distant lawn mowers hummed, a symptom of a dry day in Seattle. The disturbed land adjacent a playing field, now overtaken with invasive plants, was full of flickers, cedar waxwings, and house finches after seeds, fruits, and insects. Budlea, butterfly bushes, pleasant but still invasive, perfumed the narrow path. A Cooper’s hawk flew over with strong, rapid beats and the birds scattered for cover, unconcerned if the plants were native or not.

The dogs disappeared into the scotch broom. The leguminous seed pods popped in the heat, ready to disperse. People might then decide they needed to be pulled up, creating a perfect disturbed substrate for more reseeding and spreading. A feedback loop of failed attempts to control our mistakes. Scotch broom was great for stabilizing hillsides during road construction, but it’s a menace to those desiring the contrived purity of a native landscape. I can’t say I like it or want it choking out other plants, but sometimes I think we should focus time and attention on places that haven’t been spoiled. The area around Boeing creek is never going to be “pristine” again.

The bag of bones and feathers swung at my side. Inside it was a perspiring mess, fogging the plastic. As stomach churning as it was to think about a decomposing body fogging up a plastic bag, it also masked the occupant quite nicely. I didn’t really feel like explaining myself.

Lilly perked up as we entered a nice stand of second growth. She’s a hunter and while I don’t really mind her catching the occasional rat or gray squirrel, I always like to make sure it isn’t something else. A large black bird jumped from one truck to another, thankfully out of reach of my mongrel. A male pileated woodpecker. He flew off into the forest with an echoing call.

Skipping a cut back through the official off-leash area (because I had an owl in a bag), I took a side trail. We trod down again, through a glade of indian plum and hazelnut, mixed with non-native Hawthorne, cherry, and holly. We scared a hairy woodpecker up off a fallen log. Besides the scuttling and occasional playful snarl of a dog, it was a quiet afternoon.

Just before reaching the parking lot, we crested a hill with a clear view of the glacier carved, west side of the Olympic mountains. In several months they’d be constantly veiled by low slung clouds. In winter I typically only see the peaks. They stand higher than weather over the sound.

Disliking being pulled away from tasty blackberries, I leashed the mutts and got back into the car. The owl sat passenger, curled talons catching my eye. Maybe people killed this owl, a regrettable thing. Maybe they didn’t and it fell to something else altogether. People can’t control everything, trying to is how we create problems. Might as well make the best of it as is and protect what’s left.

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The Museum

Posted in Birds, Collecting, Museums, Natural History, Science, Seattle, Washington on September 28, 2010 by Brendan McGarry

The landscape of presentation, the selective facts that drive inquisition, and the visual stimulus, combine in the best cases for endless learning. It can be overwhelming, for it’s easy to walk away with the impression of comprehending little and feeling exhausted for it.  People blame that feeling on standing on marble floors for hours on end. A fairer attribution would be to the revelations untangling in the carriage of their mind.

Museums, from the Greek Mouseion, were the place of the muses, the patrons of art. This congers inspiration – of imagination, of knowledge. Indeed we are lucky to have such tomes all over this world. Places were we celebrate, mourn, and most importantly understand art, history, and science. They used to be institutions of the wealthy, collections that humored, satisfied the required gentlemanly hobby. The enlightenment brought museums into the public eye in the 18th century.  It is a fair venture that we should be indebted to those who took the time to catalog the treasures we find within.

There are many benefits to having them. Beyond education of a general public, they also serve to maintain our necessity for comprehension. The paramount of an museum is not what you see in the display cases, the rotating and permanent exhibits. Behind the scenes is where the real magic and importance lies.

All share a meticulous and delicate process of cataloging and preserving everything them have. Every single item in a museum, natural history or otherwise, is priceless and irreplaceable. After all, no two items will be under the exact same environmental stresses. Just because you can go out and “get” another American Robin doesn’t mean it will hold the same information as another American Robin, even one born the same year and hatched nearby. And better yet, having two birds or rather two data points is infinitely better than one.  The same can be said of pennies minted in 1972 or a Peruvian blankets woven in 1775.

Being largely a blog about birds, science, and natural history, it is only appropriate to focus on a natural history museum in this discussion. Happily Seattle is blessed to have an extremely good one, housed on the University of Washington, the Thomas Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. These subjects might not seem relevant, however with only a little imagination comes a realization that human history is essentially a segment of natural history. Even if we behave as if we aren’t part of the cycle, a part of nature, doesn’t mean we really are after all.

Natural History Museums can range in size from places like the Smithsonian or the Chicago Field Museum to small private collections like the Murie Museum of the Teton Science School in Jackson, Wyoming. Collections are amassed by, well, by collecting.  People find specimens in the field by happenstance or search them out purposefully, both depend on being an expert. It only makes sense that in looking for a certain subspecies of Savannah Sparrow, that you know what to look for before you shoot.  Now-a-days, only experts are allowed, by permit to collect or posses almost any native bird in the United States (in other words, don’t get inspired to go out and collect bird feathers after reading this – per the Migratory Bird Act). And yes, there’s that gun thing. We’ll get to that later.

The Burke Museum was founded in 1885 by members of the University of Washington’s Young Naturalists Society. They erected a building of their own volition recognizing the need to properly house an increasing population of artifacts (unless something drastic happens, an active museum is always likely to grow, even burst at the seams). In 1899 it was deemed a state museum and in 1962 it received the current name, after a bequest after Judge Thomas Burke.

The museum itself is a lumbering, boxy building. It isn’t particularly eye catching or a testament to architecture. However that is not the point or intention. Efficiency of space is paramount – those collections from Native American artifacts to the Ornithology holdings – they need proper space, ventilation, and treatments – you can’t just pile things in a box and call it good.

On display are all the trappings of a typical array of showcases. To keep people interested in a world of media, there are the typical flashing lights, videos, and interactive pieces but upon entering, there is a long glass case filled with a sampling of all the Burke has to offer. Even after you’ve perused everything, you quickly realize there is a lot more in the building than the public space.

The ornithology collections at the Burke count among one of the largest in the country.  Not only are there bird skins but they hold soft tissue samples (the second largest collection in the world), skeletons, and eggs from the world’s avian diversity.  Thanks to their pioneering work, the Burke got an early start on the practice of creating spread wings from their specimens.  As a result they have the largest and likely fastest growing collection of spread wings, a valuable thing indeed. Once a bird has been dead awhile, rigor mortis sets in and you can no longer make a puppet of it, spreading wings or flexing feet.  To allow for study of things like molt in a bird’s wings (the most complicated and interesting area of study in molt), a wing is amputated, spread properly, and let to dry.

The mammalogy and ornithology departments share a prep room where they do the surprisingly clean job of preparing study skins. Collection expeditions can’t wait around, so they are done in the field but the museum takes window kills, the bird your cat caught, local collections, or birds someone found on the beach.  Bird preparation is a delicate process and although almost anyone can learn it, only someone with much experience will produce perfect skins.  However, they also scrub skeletons the Dermestid beetles colony hasn’t fully picked clean, (any respectable museum has a colony of these beetles to clean bones of any ligament or hide) and take tissue samples here.

So museums exist, they are meticulous storehouses of historical information, and some are natural history museums.  But haven’t we moved beyond shooting birds?  We’ve binoculars, spotting scopes, cameras, video, all at our disposal.  John James Audubon and other naturalists of his time had no choice if they wanted to really understand the species they studied because these advanced optics weren’t available.  Is it really necessary now?

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Migration!

Posted in Bird Banding, Birds, Conservation, Current Events, Environmentalism, Migration, Natural History, Science, Seattle, United States, Washington on September 19, 2010 by Brendan McGarry
Migration happens once every year.  And then again maybe 6 months later.

Really it depends on an number of factors, but around here, starting in late July and extending through late September many birds are on the move away from their breeding grounds.  Some are merely altitudinal migrants, descending when the weather turns fowl in the mountains.  But a large number undertake a twice yearly journey that can span continents and oceans.  Raptors let thermals carry them much of the way, songbirds power through with the help of highways of wind, and seabirds harness the oceanic air streams.  A few of the many reasons birds are on the move is to avoid harsh weather and often more accurately  to take advantage of seasonal or episodic food sources that good weather brings, particularly in temperate clines.  There are migratory birds in every place on earth and the reasons, methods, and extremities are as diverse as the species that practice.

This phenomenon is inherently mystical, fascinating, and curious for humans.  After all, with the rare modern exceptions of hunter gatherers that follow seasonal food sources, we don’t migrate.  However, for millennia those of us in the Northern Hemisphere noticed when our vibrant sprouts begin to push up, we begin seeing swallows again; by the time the major harvests began, the field grew quiet once more.

Ancient Greeks believed absent swallows burrowed underground.

These journeys often defy our concepts of reality.  Discussions about the record holder long distant migrants shifted from the Arctic Tern (flying from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica), to the Bar-tailed Godwit (flying from the Alaska to New Zealand), to the Sooty Shearwater (Northern Hemisphere to Southern), and back again.  The Bar-tailed Godwit is held to be longest non-stop migrant  some flying about 7,000 miles in one go without any dilly dallying (they fly over water and cannot float!).  Sooty Shearwaters and Arctic Terns have both been recorded in distances exceeding 30,000 miles.  In 2006 Sooty Shearwaters broke the record for the longest distance animal migration at around 40,000 miles, making a figure 8 tour between North and South Pacific each migration.  2010 research results on Arctic Terns showed them travelings in excess of 40,000 miles in their year of travel.  (all this knowledge is a result of bird banding and lightweight radio tags).  Seabirds certainly make some of the most spectacular hauls and spend a lot of time preparing for it, allowing for around 50 percent of their body weight to store fat reserves.

Here in the Puget Sound, many of our migrants are songbirds bound for the Neotropics.  They are the reason people buy Shade Grown Coffee, because they winter in places in Mexico or Central America that produce coffee and would otherwise cut down forests to grow it.  Equally astounding is their travel, which may start as far as Alaska or Northern Canada or may be a bird that reared young in your backyard in Seattle, but will end in some instances as far South as Panama.  Not only that, but it is done largely at night!

Although it seems odd that diurnal, typically terrestrial species are flying high in the sky at night, there are some very logical admissions it allows for.  The normal predators, who would be almost impossible to avoid in high in the open during the day, are asleep.  Secondly, although birds fuel up before they leave, stops are necessary for food and water which they cannot do at night.  Finally, the most interesting part is that they are using the stars to navigate!  We long pondered how many birds were migrating at night until a technique using an instrument called an Emlen Funnel was invented in 1966 (follow the link to learn how it works).

Go out on a still night during migration and you can hear the calls of migrating songbirds.  In the city, even above the noise of urban life, they are audible.  Residing in the suburbs or away from busy roadways, one can hear hundreds, even thousands, of individuals representing dozens of species (with a bit of practice you can start to differentiate).  Some enthusiasts actually set up their own recording devices and use programs to sort and count what flew over each night.  Cornell Lab of Ornithology embarked on research doing exactly this, but on a larger scale along the Eastern Seaboard allowing for studies both on reasons for nocturnal flight calls and on population dynamics.

While these birds are on the move, they face many threats, not the least of which is the human influence.  Our massive buildings and lights confuse birds in nightly migration.  New York City’s light kill an estimated 10,000 birds a year.  We destroy habitat not only at both ends of travel, but demolish their stop overs along the way.  In short, these amazing travelers not only have the sheer obstacles of the elements, predators, and distance to come up against, but humans as well.  Research allows us to understand this phenomenon but it also helps us evaluate how we can alter our ways to benefit birds.

What brought this diatribe about?  This week, meteorologist and northwest weather expert Cliff Mass , posted a blog entry with fantastic Doppler Radar images showing birds nocturnally moving over the Puget Sound area.  There are a lot and they are moving south!

Migration is something we still don’t fully understand and this article is just the tip of the iceberg on this fascinating subject.  If you are interested in learning more I’d recommend Scott Weidensaul’s popular account,  Living On the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds.  We are luck to have some amazing technologies from sound recordings, radar imaging, and light weight radio tags to help us imagine an otherworldly behavior.

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