Records of What Birds Ate

Photo credit: Caridad Bojorquez/Proteus Gowanus

The Patuxent Wildlife Research Center houses a unique collection of records about avian diets. The records were compiled by federal scientists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who dissected the remains of 230,000 birds to analyze their stomach contents. While most of the jars that once preserved the stomach contents are gone, the records of their contents remain on hand-written notecards.

The 230,000 notecards that accompanied the jars sit in a musty basement, mostly forgotten. And they too may face destruction. As with many other historical collections, the United States Geological Survey, which now runs the center, has neither the personnel to digitize the collection nor the space to archive it properly. “If I disappear,” Mr. Droege said, “there will be no one left to champion it.”

The scientists who helped gather the collection published hundreds of articles, and even a few books, describing the food habits of more than 400 native species. Dozens of other scientists have used the collection to study how birds’ feeding habits, distribution and abundance have changed over the past 100 years. The collection, undertaken to determine how birds were harming humans, can now be used to determine how humans are harming birds.

Dr. Haas is using the collection to study how agricultural practices have changed bird diets. She said that during the 1950s, farmers in the South were encouraged to replace native grasses with cool-season grasses, which could provide food for livestock earlier in the springtime. Now several grassland birds are declining, and Dr. Haas suspects that it is because of the switch to nonnative grasses.

Jean-François Ouellet, a doctoral student at the University of Quebec at Rimouski, is using the collection to study evolutionary relationships between a bird’s size and the quality of what it eats. He said the collection was helpful for its detailed information about hundreds of birds across the country over different time periods. 

It would be a shame if these historical records disappeared. Perhaps the cards could be scanned and entered by volunteers, in a manner similar to the existing North American Bird Phenology Program.

Birds on Stamps

If you are looking for bird-related stamps, there are some new stamps depicting birds of prey from the US Postal Service. Here is what the USPS has to say about them, from the product page:

The U.S. Postal Service® salutes five kings of the sky with the Birds of Prey stamps: the northern goshawk (Accipiter gentilis), peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus), golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), osprey (Pandion haliaetus), and northern harrier (Circus cyaneus).

These powerful birds are depicted in colorful portraits and shown from the neck up. The artwork appears against a plain, white background.

Birds of prey, also known as raptors, thrive in diverse habitats and live on every continent except Antarctica. The roughly 500 species of raptors include birds that hunt by day, such as falcons, eagles, and harriers, and birds that hunt by night — the owls. They share several common characteristics; birds of prey are carnivorous and use their powerful talons to capture prey. Their exceptionally keen eyesight allows them to see small objects in detail, even from a great distance. As predators high on the food chain, raptors play an important role in maintaining the balance of nature.

Illustrator Robert Giusti worked with art director Howard E. Paine on this issuance. Giusti painted the original designs in acrylic on canvas board. The "Birds of Prey" stamps are being issued in self-adhesive sheets of 20 at an 85-cent denomination, which is the price for single-piece retail First-Class Mail weighing more than two ounces and up to and including three ounces.

I doubt I would have use for a sheet of these since I rarely send letters that heavy, but if you do, these are some stamps to use. Other wildlife-related stamps currently available include the 65-cent Baltimore Checkerspot stamps and the first-class Save Vanishing Species stamps featuring an Amur Tiger.

Birds at the Movies

An op-ed piece in tomorrow's Washington Post wonders why movie directors devote much effort to getting period costumes right but routinely botch the natural settings, especially when it comes to birds.

In James Mangold's new blockbuster Western "3:10 to Yuma," the first time we meet Ben Wade, played by tough-guy actor Russell Crowe, he is making a natural history sketch of a bird just minutes before carrying out yet another murderous stagecoach robbery. The scene establishes Wade not only as a complex character, but as a savvy birder who takes the time to document what is surely the first and only sighting in the United States of Africa's augur buzzard.

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Alas, the entertainment industry knows no shame. Moviemakers' attention to period detail in costumes, props, sets and dialogue grows ever more sophisticated, and the budgets for high-end productions regularly top tens of millions of dollars. Imagine how hard directors worked to equip Ben Wade with the right spurs and pistol. But they apparently think that getting the right bird is, well, for the birds.

Take a gander. European hooded crows in the soundtrack and in the trees, and the directors of "Cold Mountain" want us to believe we're in Appalachia? If "Apocalypto" takes place during the Mayan era, then why do cattle egrets flap by majestic temples -- 400 years before their arrival in the Americas from Africa?

"Raiders of the Lost Ark" features birds from three continents, impossibly sharing the same habitat. "Pearl Harbor" gives us the first recorded sighting of a Western scrub jay outside the mainland -- on a golf course in Oahu. Set in Sierra Leone, "Blood Diamond" features at least four birds from the Western Hemisphere, including a bobwhite.

Getting the right birds into the right place at the right time should be fairly easy to research since reference publications on birds exist for almost all areas of the planet and for most bird families. There are also extensive repositories of bird sounds and images. Cornell is probably the most prominent example in the United States, and it is hardly the only one.

The essay cites a recent Harry Potter film as an example of careful attention to authentic bird sounds. Historical accuracy may be a bit harder, but recently The New World made an attempt to incorporate extinct Carolina parakeets and other creatures of precolonial eastern North America.

The essay mentions one website loaded with example of bird mistakes in movies, How did that bird get there? What is the most egregious example that you have seen?