Category: Birds and Birding

Some links: 81

Some links, Coffee and Birds Edition:

  • Jodi Helmer reports on the nascent coffee industry in California. Even in this non-tropical climate, at least one farmer is going the shade-grown route:

    Andy Mullins of Mullins Family Farm in Temecula… planted 1,000 coffee trees under the canopies of the avocado trees on his 4-acre farm.

  • A study from India by Charlotte H. Chang et al. indicates that coffee plantations given over to robusta supported nearly the same level of biodiversity as arabica farms, as summarized by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

BPP in the literature

It’s very gratifying to read this acknowledgement:

The authors are indebted to the original BPP [Bird Phenology Program] observers and coordinators who collected the extensive data that comprise the BPP and were used here…. Thank you also to the BPP participants from around the globe who have worked to revive those records by digitizing and transcribing them in recent years.

The paper: “Long-Term Trends In Avian Migration Timing For the State of New York,” by Jessica Zelt, Robert L. Deleon, Ali Arab, Kevin Laurent, and Joel W. Snodgrass.

I haven’t transcribed cards for a while; it’s time to get back to it.

On the BBT

Biscayne National Park has partnered with the Tropical Audubon Society to promote a fun way to get new birders birding, especially kids. Birders can earn achievement certificates for identifying as many birds as they can within the confines of the park.

Listing rules follow the ABA Code of Ethics. To maximize the number of species seen, budding naturalists are encouraged to visit multiple locations on the Biscayne Birding Trail.

Here’s hoping other organizations across the country can put together similar programs.

↬ American Birding Association Birder’s Guide to Conservation and Community

Wings

…no one really knows a bird until he has seen it in flight. Since my year upon the dunes, spent in a world of magnificent fliers, I have been tempted to believe that the relation of the living bird with its wings folded to the living bird in flight is almost that of the living bird to the same bird stuffed. In certain cases, the difference between the bird on the wing and the bird at rest is so great that one might be watching two different creatures. Not only do colours and new arrangements of colours appear in flight, there is also a revelation of personality.

—Henry Beston, The Outermost House, chap. V

Some links: 75

Birds, habitat, coffee agriculture—and 10 ways of looking at Northern Virginia.

Some links: 74

A mini-roundup of bird-related links:

Summer Lazarus

Richard Conniff hopes that Ospreys will nest in his neighborhood.

An osprey on the hunt circles over open water, hovers with a characteristic fluttering, decides this isn’t quite the spot, circles and hovers some more, and finally plunges feet-first into the water. It may struggle to become airborne again, with a fish up to 14 inches long mortally pierced between its talons. The bird then heads back to the nest with its unwilling passenger slung underneath. The fish travels headforemost, silvery and slim, and often with what the poet Mary Oliver called “a scrim of red rubies on its flashing sides.”

Ospreys are the overlooked beneficiary of the post-DDT era comeback, Mary Ann to the more charismatic Peregrine Falcon (Ginger) or Bald Eagle (Lovey Howell). Beautiful predators, just the same.

I’m with you on the illegible part

In a quite useful five-part series, Steve N.G. Howell explains how field notes work and how and what you might want to record, either in the field or in the motel at the end of the day. He saves the best advice for the last installment:

In conclusion, your notes are your notes. Write what you want, but in later years you’ll only have yourself to blame if your old notes don’t contain the information you find you want. If you have time, write it all down. If you don’t, pick and choose. But whatever you do, or don’t do, the main thing is to enjoy birding.