Follow-up on the Bird Heist

The American citizen arrested for stealing bird study skins has been charged.

Detectives investigating the theft of nearly 300 brightly colored stuffed birds from the Natural History Museum in Tring arrested Edwin Rist on Friday.

Police said Monday the 22-year-old has been charged with burglary and money laundering offences.

The bird skins disappeared after reports of a break-in at the museum in June last year.

Richard Lane, director of science at the museum, said the specimens were valuable and included male trogons and quetzals from Central and South America, and birds of paradise from New Guinea.

Kiteless

In late October, a White-tailed Kite – possibly the same one that spent the summer in Connecticut – showed up in a small part of Forsythe NWR in Barnegat, New Jersey. This was only the second state record for the species, and a lot of the state's birders eagerly rushed to see it. Yesterday was my first chance to look for the kite, so I headed down with my mother and sister. We arrived at the Barnegat Municipal Dock and scanned the far shoreline for about 40 minutes with no sign of the kite. Another birder told us that he had been there for about an hour before we arrived, also with no luck. Moving on, we stopped at two vantage points for the Forsythe impoundments, one at the public beach and the other at a small observation platform. Neither had any sign of a White-tailed Kite, though we did see some waterfowl and a Belted Kingfisher. After checking the first location once more, we moved on.

We stopped at Cape May Point State Park in the late afternoon. I had hoped to see the Ash-throated Flycatcher that has been hanging around there; unfortunately it must have turned in for the evening by the time we were walking the trails. Instead, there were lots of waterfowl to look at, including a Eurasian Wigeon among the hundreds of American Wigeon. Other ducks included Ring-necked Duck, Ruddy Duck, Northern Shoveler, Northern Pintail, Gadwall, and Green-winged Teal. I noticed two male Green-winged Teal swimming close by each other, one of which had a much more prominent vertical white bar than the other one. I am not sure if this is simply normal variation or marks a difference in populations. Sibley has an illustration of a Green-winged X Common Teal hybrid that has a similarly narrow vertical bar; however, that hybrid should have a more prominent white line where the wings rest against the body than this bird does.

As the sun set and dusk rolled in, we had two memorable sightings. First, as we were watching the waterfowl, a Merlin popped over the far treeline, flew out over the lake, grabbed a songbird in midair, and flew off with the bird in its talons. It is with good reason that raptor banders call the hour before sunset the "magical Merlin hour"! Second, as we were listening to some Brown Thrashers in the twilight, a Woodcock flew over our heads; it landed a short distance in front of us and started feeding. Shortly after that we saw a couple more Woodcock flush and fly past the trail.

A Bird Skin Heist

An American citizen was arrested in the U.K. for stealing 299 bird skins from one of the world's largest ornithological collections.

Speaking at the time, Professor Richard Lane, director of science at the museum, said the birds formed part of the collection assembled over the past 350 years.

He said the items were of scientific interest, and many were irreplaceable and "literally priceless".

There are some 750,000 bird skins, representing 95% of known living species, held at the museum.

Some of them appear on the Red List of endangered species.

Professor Lane said the ornithological collections were used by researchers throughout the world, who either visit Tring or request loans.

He said: "The knowledge gleaned from these collections can help protect endangered species and answer questions about the biodiversity of the world around us.

"It is very distressing that we should have been deliberately targeted in this manner."

I hope that the skins were not severely damaged and that any scientific information accompanying them is recovered also. A bird skin is literally that: the skin (with feathers attached) of a deceased bird, stuffed with some material. (To see how a skin is prepared, see Nate's posts: part 1, part 2.) Each skin is a record of how an individual bird looked at a particular time and place. While field observation has become increasingly sophisticated, examining birds in the hand is still vital. Bird skin collections are training tools for bird illustrators, repositories for the type specimens for species and subspecies, and records of historic distribution, among other things. A theft of that many skins would be a major loss for ornithology, not just for the skins themselves, but the information they conveyed.

Finding Color in Late Autumn

Each year, autumn catches me a little off-guard, even though it goes through more or less the same sequence year after year. I am surprised by how early the first leaves start turning, by how long it takes the foliage peak to arrive, how quickly the peak passes, and how long traces of color persist after the peak. A similar process happens with bird migration, especially in the spring when birds need to reach their breeding grounds quickly.

The tree up at the top is a Pin Oak. I posted a photo of the same species, but in black and white, a couple days ago. I like photographing leaves backlit or against the sky since that seems to bring out the best in their color, whether it is green in summer or other colors in autumn. This is true of the Pin Oak at top and even more so for the plum tree above, whose colors look far more dull when viewed from other angles.

Backlighting really helps to bring out the varied colors of dried or drying leaves, like this grape leaf. Subtle gradations of brown are often visible to a careful observer's eye, but they can be difficult to reproduce on a camera's sensor. These dried leaves are not just dead and boring; they have a beauty of their own.

Loose Feathers #264

Bald Eagle with Young / USFWS Photo

Birds and birding news

• California hosted two rare gulls this week. First, an Ivory Gull showed up at Grover Beach in San Luis Obispo County. It was only the second state record for that species. Second, a Black-tailed Gull was found at Long Beach in Los Angeles County. You can read more about the rarities (including a Taiga Bean Goose) at Christopher Taylor's blog.
• Recent sightings patterns suggest that Ivory Gulls may be encountering ecological turmoil on their home range. Since 2005, there have been 12 records in the United States, compared to 28 over the past century.
• Open landfills in northern Alaska are causing a boom in the population of Glaucous Gulls. This is great for the gulls but not so great for other birds since Glaucous Gulls prey on the eggs and young of many nesting shorebirds.
• Staten Island hosts a small flock of Wild Turkeys that has been wandering around the Ocean Breeze neighborhood since 2000. The birds may not be completely wild since their plumage shows evidence of some domestic lineage.
• A roadkill Bald Eagle in New Brunswick, Canada, was banded as a nestling in Maine in June 1977; this makes it the oldest Bald Eagle recorded in the wild at 32 years, 10 months. Another Bald Eagle found dead in Maine lived to be 32 years, 4 months.
• Three men in Newfoundland were fined for selling Common Murres and Common Eiders.
• Early ripening and late ripening berries attract different sets of bird species. The latter are especially useful for overwintering birds.
• A rare Flores Scops-owl was recently photographed in Indonesia by visiting Danish scientists.
• Applying UV decals to the windows of the Baltimore Sun building seems to have reduced bird collisions.

Birds in the blogosphere

• Net Results: Bird-Friendly coffee piece on NPR
• Sibley Guides: Questions about Starling migration
• Birdchick: I Hired A New Orleans Street Poet To Write A Titmouse Poem
• Birding in Maine: Hand Feeding Pine Siskins
• Avian Images: Brown Creeper!
• WolfeNotes: Cost Benefit Analysis For The Birds

Oil Spill

• A new report argues that oil companies and governments are ill-prepared to deal with an oil spill in the Arctic. 
• According to a local television station, some Turkey Vultures were found and rescued while coated in oil and floating in Florida's Biscayne Bay. The station does not report where the oil came from or how the vultures got there. (One possibility is that they were tired migrants.)
• Dead coral found on the seafloor around the site of BP's blown out well was probably killed by the oil spill.
• Oil from BP's well entered the food web by way of marine bacteria, which were in turn eaten by zooplankton. The latter will eventually be eaten by larger creatures.

Environment and biodiversity

• Entomologists recently recorded 6,619 ants of 13 species on the medians of major streets in Manhattan.
• The EPA issued guidelines about how it expects to enforce its new greenhouse gas regulations. Regulators will take technological constraints into account when deciding whether to require modifications of an existing carbon source.
• You can find more accurate information about climate change in The Onion than you will hear from my state's governor.
• The winners of the 2010 European Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition were announced this week. National Geographic has a gallery of the images.

Carnivals

• I and the Bird #138
• Scientia Pro Publica #45
• Scientia Pro Publica #44