I and the Bird #37

It is time for another edition of I and the Bird, postponed a week for Thanksgiving festivities. Visit Five Wells for I and the Bird #37.

I and the Bird is a biweekly compendium of the best blogging about birds and birders, with self-submitted posts. To learn how to participate, visit here.

Tags:

• Blog carnival

Species on the Move and Carbon Increase

Two stories appeared this week with more bad news on climate change. First, a review of 866 papers found that animal and plant species are shifting their ranges northward, while polar species are dying out.

"Wild species don't care who is in the White House," Parmesan said. "It is very obvious they are desperately trying to move to respond to the changing climate. Some are succeeding. But for the ones that are already at the mountaintop or at the poles, there is no place for them to go. They are the ones that are going extinct."

Among the most affected species, Parmesan said, are highland amphibians in the tropics. She said more than two-thirds of 110 species of harlequin frogs, which occupy mountain cloud forests in Central America, have become extinct in the past 35 years.

Meanwhile, many pest species -- including roaches, fleas, ticks and tree-killing beetles -- are surviving warming winters in increasing numbers. "We are seeing throughout the Northern Hemisphere that pests are able to have more generations per year, which allows them to increase their numbers without being killed off by cold winter temperatures," said Parmesan.

The linked article from the Post included several paragraphs on the economic implications, in this case ski resorts and power companies. I imagine that they are not the only industries facing challenges.

Meanwhile, the rate of increase of carbon emissions has risen since 2000. Around that year , the annual rate of increase rose from about 1% to 2.5%. The Global Carbon Project, which established those figures, identified two causes.

"There has been a change in the trend regarding fossil fuel intensity, which is basically the amount of carbon you need to burn for a given unit of wealth," explained Corinne Le Quere, a Global Carbon Project member who holds posts at the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey.

"From about 1970 the intensity decreased - we became more efficient at using energy - but we've been getting slightly worse since the year 2000," she told the BBC News website.

"The other trend is that as oil becomes more expensive, we're seeing a switch from oil burning to charcoal which is more polluting in terms of carbon."

Tags:

• Climate Change
• Global Warming

Review: Letters from Eden

Last week I reviewed Club George, a book that narrates one season of watching birds in Central Park. This week the seasonal theme continues with Letters from Eden: A Year at Home, in the Woods, by Julie Zickefoose. Unlike Club George, this book is not a birding journal. Letters from Eden consists of 31 essays that were published in Bird Watcher's Digest over an eight-year period in a feature called "Watcher at the Window." Each essay is illustrated with paintings and sketches by the author.

Zickefoose arranged the essays by season, rather than by date of composition. The essays are not equally grouped among the seasons; a third fall under spring. (Spring seems to bring out the best in nature writers.) The arrangment by season causes a bit of dissonance when her children appear to oscillate in age from one essay to the next. Zickefoose's lively writing and attractive illustrations make the distraction minimal.

Reviewing a collection like this is tricky because each chapter was written as a free-standing essay. Each has its own theme or flows from a particular event. As such they defy easy summary. However, several common themes and subjects run through the book, so I discuss them below in loose groupings based on theme.

Essays are set in the context of the property surrounding Zickefoose's residence. Zickefoose and her husband, Bill Thompson III, own an eighty-acre rural property that they manage for wildlife. From what I gather from the essays, part is wooded and part is meadow. Many of essays describe how the changing seasons affect the author's daily walks in the woods and meadows around her home. These essays describe the author's observations, with plenty of detail about what different animal species are doing and why.

A second large group of essays are about individual species. Many are species that the author holds dear and attempts to attract to her property: Eastern Phoebe, American Robin, Brown Thrasher, Tree Swallow, and Carolina Wren. One is a disliked species: European Starling. Essays on individual species combine the author's personal observations with details about the bird's behavior. The breeding process - from mating displays to nest building to raising chicks - has a prominent place in these essays. These species nest around the author's home.

The author's daily walks on the family property inspire most of the essays in the groups mentioned above. A few essays use the walks as a gateway to discuss issues in managing land specifically for wildlife. Two deal with specifically with management: balancing mowing with the nesting needs of species like woodcock and gardening methods that benefit birds. Two others identify species that become harmful in the wrong context: the invasive multiflora rose that is difficult to control and the bullfrogs that started eating birds around the family's pond. Another warns of the dangers of spreading disease through bird feeders.

Respect for animals and concern for their welfare runs through most of the essays, but a few deal specifically with these issues. In the spectrum of opinion on how much humans should intervene in the lives of animals, Zickefoose would probably fall more towards the interventionist end. She stops her car for turtles and helps baby bird back into their nests, has guarded piping plover nests, smashes animal traps, and once caught a sparrow in a food store to let it loose in the wild. One particularly good essay describes the dangers facing box turtles and what she does to help. Another very good essay discusses birds' intelligence.

The author's family features prominently throughout the essays. Many were written when her children were very young, so they frequently appear as actors. A few essays deal with the challenges of balancing parental responsibilities with her activities as a naturalist. One of the best essays associates evening grosbeaks with memories of her late father.

All essays are fully illustrated with paintings and sketches relevant to each essay's themes. The illustrations were not originally published with her column. Many were selected from the author's archive of paintings and sketch books and bear a note with the date of composition. Others were original illustrations painted for this publication. Full color paintings depict scenes from the essays, such as the fighting starlings shown below. Many of the pencil sketches illustrate a variety of postures and behaviors. Zickefoose depicts birds as birders see them in the field: feeding, gathering nesting materials, incubating and guarding chicks, and keeping watch for threats.

Letters from Eden was a fun read made better by the lovely illustrations. While the book is clearly not a nature journal, the chapters have the feel of journal entries, and the book as a whole has the feel of a yearly journey. The anecdotal style makes the serious themes raised in several essays approachable.

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Images published here are from Letters from Eden: A Year at Home, in the Woods by Julie Zickefoose. Copyright (c) 2006 by Julie Zickefoose. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

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Full citation:

Julie Zickefoose, Letters from Eden: A Year at Home, in the Woods. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Pp. xvi, 224; color illustrations and index. $26.00 cloth. ISBN: 0618573089.

To purchase:
Amazon

Author's website:
Julie Zickefoose has her own blog. On a few occasions, she has taken readers through her painting process. Here, for example, she completes a commissioned painting of a Carolina Parakeet. She also painted an ivory-billed woodpecker, which was blogged in five parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.

Turkey at the Battery

A wild turkey has been hanging around Battery Park in New York City. Now Battery Park is not the ideal place for a turkey to roam. Green space in the park is rather cramped, and there is not much place to hide. However, like the local pigeons, it can get by based on food offerings from humans. The bird has been named "Zelda" by the local birders.

Under usual circumstances, Ms. Hobel frowns on anyone feeding wild animals. Even the most well-intentioned offering can do a bird like Zelda harm. People have tossed peanuts, which are bad for a turkey’s digestion, or — horror of horrors — bread. “It’s like feeding somebody Styrofoam,” Ms. Hobel said.

But yesterday found two seasoned bird men in Battery Park, both well aware of Zelda’s gastronomical needs. One, Phil Lombardi, a park supervisor, supplies Zelda with chicken feed just about every day. The other, Peter May, said he was tossing seeds to other park birds one day when Zelda muscled in, driving her lesser competitors away. He has been feeding her since.

I saw this turkey last year and again yesterday.

Northern Shrike at the Great Swamp

Photo by Marek Szczepanek (via Wikipedia)

For the past few days I have been in New Jersey visiting family. This afternoon I went with them to the Great Swamp, a National Wildlife Refuge a bit south of Morristown. We all have a love for the outdoors, though not all are equally interested in birds.

At our last stop, the heronry overlook on Pleasant Plains Road, we spotted the northern shrike that has been hanging around there recently. It was in the field across the road from the overlook, closer to the manmade pond than to the overlook itself. We were able to watch it for some time, as it perched out in the open on top of some small shrubs.

Northern shrikes have a color pattern similar to mockingbirds, with the exception of a black mask and black flight feathers. The tail is proportionately shorter than a mockingbird's, and the bill is short, thick, and hooked. This shrike sat upright - almost like a flycatcher - and swooped frequently to the ground in pursuit of prey. I am not sure if any of its sallies were successful; if they were, the prey must have been small because I could not see anything in its bill. It is much easier to recognize a shrike than I originally thought it would be.

Shrikes have a reputation for cruelty, which is not entirely deserved. (The genus name Lanius means "butcher.") Partly the reputation stems from shrikes' habit of impaling prey on thorns or barbed wire fences, as in the photograph above. They do this in some cases to hold larger prey in place while they eat it, and at other times to save food for later in case of scarcity. Though they are small birds, shrikes will kill small rodents and small birds for food. I imagine that such catches are ugly scenes, since a shrike's feet and bill are not powerful enough to render a swift blow.

In any case, this was my first sighting of this unusual species. Apparently there have been shrike sightings at this location for the past few years, and the local birders seemed to be well aware of its presence. Despite that, northern shrikes are somewhat rare for New Jersey, and even rarer around D.C. Most breed in Alaska and northern Canada, and few make it this far south for the winter. It was a great bird and a great day to be out.

Update: A photo of the Great Swamp bird is available here.