The 124^th Christmas Bird Count (CBC), sponsored by the National Audubon Society, conducted between December 15, 2023, and January 6, 2024, is now history. The data provide us with information on the status of our regular winter residents, the number of northern birds coming south to seek food, and the number of summering birds that have ignored their normal migrate-by date. A rarity or two always spices up a count.

The Waterville CBC on December 17 produced a fine total of 60 species, well above the average. There was plenty of open water, so waterfowl put on a good show. Ten species were found including record highs for Canada Goose (361) and Buffleheads (28). The rarest were pairs of Greater Scaup and American Wigeon. The eight Common Loons were also a record high count.

Three Barred Owls were tallied along with a dozen Red-bellied Woodpeckers (all-time high) and a lingering Northern Flicker. Record high counts were set for five species that left the state to overwinter in the past: Carolina Wren (9), Eastern Bluebird (19), American Robins (180), White-throated Sparrow (65) and Savannah Sparrow (6).  The only northern finches were 21 Purple Finches and 13 Pine Siskins.

The Bunker Hill CBC yielded a fine total of 62 species. Thirteen species of waterfowl were present, including 334 Canada Geese (an all-time high count), a Northern Pintail and all three of our diving ducks in the genus Aythya: 11 Ring-necked Ducks, 29 Greater Scaup and one Lesser Scaup.

Lingering birds including two Turkey Vultures, a Red-shouldered Hawk, and a Belted Kingfisher.

The only alcids were a pair of Dovekies. A great find!

Six species of woodpeckers were found including a lingering Yellow-bellied Sapsucker and seven Northern Flickers.

Notable records for the songbirds included all-time high counts for Golden-crowned Kinglets (41), Eastern Bluebirds (151) and White-throated sparrows (70). A Swamp Sparrow, an Eastern Towhee and a Red-winged Blackbird would normally have migrated south.

The only birds of northern affinity were 21 Purple Finches and three Red Crossbills. The 638 American Goldfinches were a new high count.

The Thomaston-Rockland CBC on December 17 produced 79 species. Nineteen of those were waterfowl, including some unexpected species: one Gadwall, two Ring-necked Ducks and a Ruddy Duck.

Only one Red-throated Loon was found among the 103 Common Loons. Horned Grebes outnumbered Red-necked Grebes, 31 to 4.

This count produced a long list of lingering birds that were induced to delay their southward migrations. These included two Great Blue Herons, two Turkey Vultures, a Belted Kingfisher, a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, an American Kestrel, a Carolina Wren, two Northern Mockingbirds, a Pine Warbler, a Yellow-rumped Warbler, two Savannah Sparrows, eight Red-winged Blackbirds, a Baltimore Oriole. Climate change, anyone?

Birds of northern origin included a Northern Shrike, two Red Crossbills and three White-winged Crossbills.

Continuing downeast, we find that the Blue Hill CBC on December 17 produced a list of 65 species.

Fifteen species of waterfowl were dominated by Mallards (416) and American Black Ducks (417). Two Northern Pintails and a Ring-necked Duck were notable finds.

The Common Loon count of 56 was a new count record but Red-throated Loons were no-shows. The only grebes were three Red-necked Grebes.

Lingering non-songbirds included two Red-shouldered Hawks, a Belted Kingfisher, and a Northern Flicker.

Only one alcid was found along the shore but it was a good one: Common Murre.

The count had some half-hardy, lingering songbirds but the most striking songbird pattern to me was the number of species with new high counts. These species were Common Raven, Tufted Titmouse, White-breasted Nuthatch, Brown Creeper, Winter Wren, Eastern Bluebird, European Starling, and White-throated Sparrow.

The Mount Desert Island CBC had 60 species on December 15. The count had 13 species of waterfowl, all regularly occurring species. The most common were Mallards, Long-tailed Ducks, and Bufflehead.

Common Loons outnumbered Red-throated Loons, 111 to 2. Double-Crested Cormorants and Great Cormorants both appeared.

Lingering birds included a Great Blue Heron, a Northern Harrier, a Red-headed Woodpecker (!), and a Hermit Thrush. Birds of northern affinity included eight Bohemian Waxwings, four Purple Finches, and a single White-winged Crossbill.

The Unity CBC on December 16 produced a nice list of 52 species. Highlights among the seven species of waterfowl were four American Wigeons, a Greater Scaup and two Buffleheads. Two Common Loons found enough open water to stick around as well.

Northern Shrikes have mostly stayed to our north this winter so the singleton here was notable. Eastern Bluebirds have been wintering broadly across Maine this winter in impressive numbers. The Unity counters found 35. Other lingering birds included three Savannah Sparrows and a Swamp Sparrow.

Four northern finches were present, including an impressive 36 Red Crossbills in this non-invasion winter.

The Augusta CBC, also on December 16, yielded 59 species. Seven species of waterfowl included three Buffleheads (new high). The count of 18 Common Loons (new high) was made even sweeter by the sighting of a Red-throated Loon. The latter is rare inland in Maine in the winter.

Hardy lingering birds included three Great Blue Herons (new high), three Sandhill Cranes, a Northern Flicker, eight Carolina Wrens, 106 Eastern Bluebirds (new high), a Hermit Thrush, two Northern Mockingbirds, and three Common Grackles. But the most amazing lingering bird was a Blue-headed Vireo. Although this species is the last of our vireos to migrate south in the fall, but most have departed by Halloween.

An eye-popping 213 Bald Eagles were found, easily a new high for the count. Northern visitors included five Common Redpolls and a dozen Red Crossbills.

The Farmington count on December 28 tallied 38 species. Open water was hard to find so diving ducks and loons were long gone. The only waterfowl were Mallards and American Black Ducks.

Diurnal raptors sighted were three Red-tailed Hawks, four Bald Eagles and a Merlin.

This area seems to be a stronghold for Black-capped Chickadees. The total of 516 far outnumbered any other species.

Lingering species included 14 Eastern Bluebirds and 24 Cedar Waxwings. Two Bohemian Waxwings, our normal winter waxwing, are hopefully a harbinger of more of these beauties this winter. Pine Siskins were well represented with 55 individuals. Otherwise, this count was average, not many surprises but no alarm bells.

Let’s move to one of the Maine CBC’s with the harshest winter weather. The Misery Township CBC is located just to the south of Jackman. One would expect that the species diversity in this challenging habitat would be low. The nineteen species found on New Year’s Day was actually a pretty good total. I have participated in this count when only 14 species were found by multiple parties.

Two Bald Eagles were the only raptors. A couple of Gray Jays imparted a northern flavor to the count. American Crows (4) and Common Ravens (2) were scarce.

Black-capped Chickadees were the most abundant species with 124 counted. Runners-up were 34 Red-breasted Nuthatches and 33 Blue Jays. 

I have nothing but respect for a Common Grackle that was still sticking around. Northern finches included five Purple Finches, six Red Crossbills, 46 White-winged Crossbills and 53 Pine Siskins.

We’ll go now to the southernmost CBC in Maine. The Isles of Shoals CBC is centered on a few small islands that straddle the Maine-New Hampshire border about ten miles off the coast. Definitely a count for the hardy birder.

The count his year took place on January 1. Clear weather and calm seas made for a pleasant boat cruise. The counters did go ashore at Star Island for some land birding, but this count is really all about seabirds.

Highlights of the 37 species included 790 Common Eiders, 1936 Black Scoters (shattering the old record of 964), 68 Purple Sandpipers, a Pomarine Jaeger, 16 Atlantic Puffins (new high), 11 Common Murres (new record) and seven species of gulls. The five perching bird species surprisingly included a Carolina Wren and a Palm Warbler.

I can’t think of any branch of science that has benefited more from volunteers and amateurs than ornithology. I have three citizen-science projects to tell you about today. None require a large time commitment but do offer the chance to advance our knowledge of birds.

The first is participation in a National Audubon Christmas Bird Count (CBC). These one-day counts will be held between December 14, 2023, and January 5, 2024. This continent-wide project has been going on since 1900 and offers a hugely valuable way to track changes in winter bird abundance. I believe the CBC is the first citizen-project undertaken in the United States.

You can find a list of over 30 Maine CBCs on the Maine Audubon website: https://maineaudubon.org/birding/christmas-bird-count/. The email address of the count compiler is provided. All you need to do is to contact the compiler and ask tol be assigned to a team. You don’t have to be an expert to participate. The more eyes, the better. Plus, communal birding is great fun.

During the winter, owls mostly persist on bird and mammal prey. Rather than passing the sharp bones through their gut, owls regurgitate the bones, feathers, and fur of their prey as distinctive pellets. The pellets are usually disgorged beneath an owl’s roost tree. The pellets are usually easier to find once the ground is snow-covered.

The Maine Owl Pellet Project (google the project name for more information) is a collaborative project between the University of New England, the Maine Dept. of Inland Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Volunteers are provided with information on how to find pellets. Pellets are sent to the project directors and specialists puzzle out the prey in each pellet based on the disarticulated bones.

The project directors are particularly keen to find out how often the northern bog lemming appears in pellets. This lemming is state-threatened and we have much to learn about this rodent.

In any winter, a subset of northern finches may migrate south of their boreal breeding grounds to spend the winter in New England or further south. These irruptions are thought to be triggered by low seed production in the far north by the trees each species depends on.

In some years, we are graced by appearance of large numbers of Red Crossbills. But the classification of these crossbills is complicated. Across North America, at least 10 populations defined by distinctive flight notes are known. Another, called Type 12, has just recently been recognized. Birds with different call types differ in shape and in dietary preference.

Dr. Cody Porter of the University of Iowa is particularly interested in the Type 12 Red Crossbills in the eastern United States. He is asking birders to record any red crossbill they find this winter (a recording with your phone is fine) and the type of conifer the bird was feeding on.

To get a clear understanding of the dietary preferences of different red crossbill types, he needs many recordings. To find details of this project, just visit: https://ckporter.weebly.com/eastern-red-crossbill-ecology.html

Bird eponyms

A few months ago, I wrote about the controversy surrounding the memorializing of people in the common names of birds. For instance, Swainson’s Thrush and Cooper’s Hawk. A broad movement exists to advocate for the removal of all these eponyms from common names of birds because some of those names honor people with disreputable and even despicable pasts.

On November 1, the Checklist-committee of the American Ornithological Society Council voted to begin the removal of all eponymous bird names in the Americas. We will no longer have Bicknell’s Thrush on Maine mountain tops or Hellmayr’s Pipit in Argentina.

The process will take years and will involve many stakeholders such as birders, social scientists, communication specialists, taxonomists and the general public. Choosing which eponyms to change would be problematic so the decision was to remove all eponyms.

We know that birds have remarkable vision and hearing. However, the received wisdom from ornithology texts is that birds have a poor sense of smell. This claim is based in part on the rather unimpressive sizes of the olfactory lobes of a bird’s brain. These lobes extend anteriorly in the skull, underlying the bill where the external nostrils are located.

There are a few groups of birds that do have remarkable senses of smell. The tubenoses (albatrosses, petrels, and storm-petrels) are the zenith of bird olfaction. Tubenoses forage on the open ocean for small fish and squid near the surface. These prey items give off oils that float on top of the heavier water.

The problem with depending on these oceanic animals for food is that they are notoriously patchy in their distribution. No problem for an albatross or petrel; they wander broadly over the open ocean, smelling their way to a patch of fish or squid.

This method of foraging is made possible by the long, thin wings of these birds. An albatross’s wingspan can exceed ten feet. By orienting into the ever-present  winds on the open ocean, a tubenose gains lift and can then tack in any direction. As they lose altitude, they simply turn into to the wind to gain more lift.

The result is an efficient means of flying. A tubenose can cover hundreds of miles in a day scarcely flapping a wing.

If you go on an off-shore bird trip, you will see that the leader will occasionally pour fish oils and offal overboard to create an oil slick to try to draw in tubenoses. I vividly remember a pelagic trip out of Westport, Washington when chum was put into the water about 40 miles offshore. Within 15 minutes, 90 Black-footed Albatrosses were flying and sitting close by. I felt so sorry for one very seasick birder who could not even raise his head to look at the albatrosses.

The Turkey Vulture also has a remarkable sense of smell. In this case, the vulture is sensitive to ethyl mercaptan, the odorous compound in carrion. Some petroleum companies use this sensitivity to their advantage by putting ethyl mercaptan in the gasoline carried through pipelines. Any pipeline leak is easily found by looking for Turkey Vultures hovering over the leak.

Recent work has indicated that other birds may have keener senses of smell than previously recognized.

For his doctoral research, Alex Van Huynh showed how Black-capped Chickadees and Carolina Chickadees keep from hybridizing. Apparently, the chickadees have a tough time telling the two species apart like we birders! The chickadees produce a chemical signal (a pheromone) that differs between species. Who knew chickadees might choose a mate by smell?

Ivan Hiltpold and W. G. Shriver at the University of Delaware investigated the importance of smell for birds in finding insect prey in corn fields.

Plants and herbivorous insects are at war. Plants can use structural defenses, like thick leaves or thorns, to try to deter insects. They also can use chemical defense by producing noxious chemicals that kill or deter insects.

The defensive chemicals (methyl jasmonate and methyl salicylate are the most common) are expensive to make and are volatile, so they do not stay in a plant’s leaves for long. Plants therefore make them only after insects start attacking. Release the chemical defense!

Here’s the really cool part. The authors found that insectivorous birds were attracted to a mixture of these defensive chemicals. So, the defensive chemicals produced by the plants have two beneficial effects: they deter or kill herbivorous insects and they attract birds to eat the insects.

Ecologists call this three-level interaction a top-down food chain. As you go down the food chain, the effects alternate. For instance, if you increase bird predation, the insects go down and the plants grow better. From the perspective of plants, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

It’s enough of a challenge to develop effective conservation plans for resident birds. But finding ways to maximize our efforts to conserve migratory birds can seem daunting. For a species like a Blackpoll Warbler or a Bobolink, mortality is possible on the wintering grounds, on the breeding grounds and twice a year during migration.

We have plenty of evidence that wintering habitats are diminishing because of deforestation and pollution. Similarly, habitat loss affects the amount of suitable breeding habitat. Mortality during migration is thought to be the most significant threat to migratory birds.

It therefore behooves us to identify the most important stopover areas and conserve them as best we can. Some species like shorebirds and waterfowl engage in connect-the-dot migrations, massing in large numbers at traditional stopovers as migration proceeds. Familiar examples are the Bay of Fundy for Semipalmated Sandpipers, Grays Harbor, Washington and the Copper River Delta, Alaska for Western Sandpipers, Delaware Bay for Red Knots and Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area, Pennsylvania for Snow Geese.

Migrating passerines migrate along a broad front with no traditional stop-over areas. That’s why you might see a Maine Mourning Warbler or a Lincoln’s Sparrow anywhere in the southeastern United States during migration. The migrating birds land either because of exhaustion or weather impacts.

We now have a more nuanced view of migratory stops for passerines. Some areas seem to attract higher densities of migrants. Shouldn’t those areas have high priority for conservation?

Of course, the answer is yes but we still need definitive evidence to document the number of migrants that stop at a particular place. To do so demands that we have a reliable way to quantify the birds.

Bird-banding stations provide quantitative information on the number of migrants passing through a local area. Running a banding station is a huge undertaking, requiring funding to buy nets and poles and recruiting and training volunteers.  We simply don’t have the capacity to set up banding sites broadly across the country.

We do have more modern technology that can be brought to bear in our efforts to identify important stopover areas. Radar ornithology has been an important subfield since World War II. During the war, radar observers noted enigmatic shapes on their radar screens, calling them angels. We know now that that the angels were flocks of migrating birds.

Now with the developed of Doppler weather radars, radar ornithologists can visualize individual birds, bats and even migrating insects like butterflies and dragonflies. Some Doppler radars are so sensitive that the rate of wing flapping can be discerned!

Fengyi Guo from Princeton and three colleagues recently published a paper that makes a huge leap in our understanding of migration hotspots. They used 60 weather radars in the eastern United States to examine the density of migrants at several geographic scales. Two of the radars were in Maine, one south of Portland and one in the Houlton area. The study was done for five autumn migrations (2015-2019).

At the broadest scale, the data supported the broad-front hypothesis for passerine migration. Migrating nocturnal passerines could be detected anywhere as they took flight and embarked on the next migratory leg. Even at this scale, the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains had more migrants.

Looking at smaller scales, the authors showed there were distinct habitats that consistently had high densities of nocturnal migrants. Over all five years, higher migrant densities increased with the percentage of forested landscape of all types and decreased as the percentage of croplands and pastures increased. In areas like Illinois where large tracts of forest are scarce, migrant densities were strongly concentrated in patches of forest. Broad swaths of open habitat act as barriers.

The data tell us our efforts in protecting migrants should be to preserve forest, particularly deciduous forest, in highly altered habitats. Maine is in good shape in this regard.

Herb Wilson taught ornithology and other biology courses at Colby College. He welcomes reader comments and questions at [email protected]

The U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service regularly conducts a survey to determine how many birdwatchers there are in the country.  Their most general category is based simply on whether a person looks at birds, perhaps only at home. They estimate a whopping 45 million people qualify as birdwatchers. A more selective definition classifies a birdwatcher as someone who travels at least a mile from her house to see birds. Sixteen million people qualify as this type of birdwatcher.

Certainly, not all those 16 million birdwatchers travel great distances to see birds. Nevertheless, the USFWS estimates that birdwatching adds 96 billion dollars to the U.S economy each year and provides 782,000 jobs.

I think most Maine birders would agree that the Steller’s Sea-Eagle that spent parts of the last two winters here is the bird of the century so far. This species is native to eastern Russia and Japan and rarely occurs in Alaska. The one we saw here is a wanderer having been sighted in Texas, Massachusetts, Maine, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.

The eagle was first confirmed in Maine at Five Islands on December 30, 2021. The bird stayed in the Georgetown/Boothbay region until early March 2022. It was subsequently seen in Nova Scotia and spent the summer of 2022 in Newfoundland.

The eagle appeared again in Maine on February 4, 2023, and remained until early March, attracting lots of birders. The eagle spent the summer again in Newfoundland and was photographed there as recently as September 24. Many of us are hoping the eagle will spend a portion of the winter in Maine again.

Because of the extreme rarity of Steller’s Sea-Eagle in North America outside of Alaska, many birders have visited Maine from great distances to try to see and photograph this astounding bird. A look at the license plates of birders at popular viewing spots for the eagle tells us much about the draw of this bird.

If you have been among the hordes of people looking for the eagle, have you ever wondered what the economic impact of these birders is?  Motel rooms, meals, hot coffee and more hot coffee, warmer clothes, gasoline, airline tickets. I know I have in a fleeting, off-hand way.

A more serious approach was undertaken by Brent Pease and three colleagues in a paper published recently in People and Nature. Brent is a member of the School of Forestry and Horticulture at Southern Illinois University.

The authors point out that analyses of the economic impact of vagrant birding are few and no previous studies of a large, charismatic bird has been conducted.

The authors solicited on-line surveys of birders who chased the eagle between December 2021 and January 31, 2022, when the bird was in Massachusetts briefly and Maine. The survey asked for information on time spent chasing the birds, sociodemographic variables, expenditures associated with their effort, and an estimate of the number of other birders present while looking for the eagle.

The researchers received 680 responses to their survey requests. Fifty-five percent of the responders were at least 55 years old. About 13% of the responders were in each of the 25-34, 35-44 and 45-54 age categories.

The birders were overwhelmingly white, over 96% of the responders. Five percent of the observers flew to Maine to try to see the eagle. The average distance driven by car was about 360 miles although one person drove 1,460 miles.

The authors determined conservatively that 2,350 birders tried to see the sea-eagle over the study period. Each observer spent an average of $180 on expenditures. Birders contributed between $380,604 and $476,626 dollars to the Maine and Massachusetts economy!

This value is an underestimate for Maine since it does not include the winter of 2023 or February and March 2022. The Steller’s Sea-Eagle has brought great joy to birders and bucks to the Maine economy. Here’s hoping for its return this winter!

The focus of this post is some recent research that expands our knowledge of bird vision. But first, we have to delve into some physics.

Energy is propagated throughout the universe in the form of electromagnetic radiation. This radiation emanates like waves on the ocean with alternating crests and troughs. Wavelength, the distance between two consecutive crests, varies hugely. Radio waves have the longest wavelengths, exceeding a millimeter. Visible light wavelengths are measured in the thousandths of millimeters and x-rays and gamma rays have even shorter wavelengths.

Physicists divide electromagnetic radiation into seven categories, based on how a particular wavelength of radiation interacts with water. In decreasing wavelength, we have radio waves, microwaves, ultraviolet radiation, visible light, infrared radiation, x-rays and gamma rays.

Do you remember learning the mnemonic device ROYGBIV in grade school to remember the colors of the rainbow? Red, orange, yellow . . .

We call those wavelengths of radiation visible light simply because our eyes can distinguish them.

We visualize that radiation with light receptors in the cones of our eyes. Humans have three kinds of receptors (blue, green and red), each acutely sensitive to particular wavelengths.

About 10% of human males (including me) and 1% of human females are missing one of these three receptors. The condition is called colorblindness and is misleading because we can distinguish colors. But lacking the green or red receptor, I have a devil of time distinguishing red from green at any distance.

The higher primates are the only mammals with three color receptors. Most other mammals have two.

How about birds? Most birds have either four or five kinds of color receptors, each sensitive to a different wavelength. The ability of birds to distinguish color far surpasses human ability. The density of the cones in the retina of a bird is two to three times the density in the human eye, making avian vision even crisper.

Our notion of visible light does not pertain to birds. One of their receptors can detect ultraviolet radiation. In fact, some birds seem to be more sensitive to ultraviolet radiation than to visible light. Birds see colors where our human eyes fail to perceive any color.

Ornithologists can use ultraviolet-light detectors to determine the portions of a bird that reflect ultraviolet light and render them into a color that we can see on a screen.

Most birds reflect ultraviolet radiation from their feathers. Like the blue color of birds, the ultraviolet reflectance is caused not by a pigment but rather by selective reflectance of incoming radiation. The hollow feathers capture most of the wavelengths of incoming light and reflect out only the blue and ultraviolet wavelengths.

Birds see each other in ways we cannot appreciate. Consider two tanagers from Ecuador and Colombia: the Black-chinned Mountain Tanager and the Blue-winged Mountain Tanager. Even experienced ornithologists have difficulty telling them apart in the field. It’s no problem for the birds. The Black-chinned has bright ultraviolet reflectance on its back; the Blue-winged lacks that color. We would never know given the limitations of human eyes.

Some flowers and fruits have colors or patterns that are visible only to animals that can see in the ultraviolet. Many fruits fluoresce in the ultraviolet wavelengths, but leaves do not, making the ripe fruits obvious for fruit-eaters.

Blue Tits use their ultraviolet vision to detect camouflaged caterpillars. Female bluethroats choose mates based on the ultraviolet coloration of males. Such selection is likely in many species.

Deaths from window collisions kills millions of birds each year. People sometimes put tape or decals on their windows to try to reduce bird collisions. Recent work has shown that putting films that reflect ultraviolet light on windows makes the glass obvious to birds but is invisible to humans. One study showed a five-fold reduction in bird collisions when ultraviolet-reflecting film was attached to windows.

Birds and butterflies make good companions for a birder. When birding is slow, paying attention to the scaled jewels flitting around us is a satisfying activity. Who isn’t charmed by the striking orange and black colors of a Monarch or Viceroy or fritillary, the vivid yellow of sulphur butterflies, or the black and white colors of a White Admiral?

Most binoculars these days have close-focus capability. With such binoculars, identifying most of the 122 species of butterflies and skippers in the state is pretty straightforward. With practice, many species can be identified by the naked eye.

Beginning in 2003, three colleagues and I launched the Maine Butterfly Survey (MBS), an ambitious project to map the distribution of Maine butterflies at the township level. Because Maine has 911 townships, mapping distributions at the township level was no small task.

The MBS relied on volunteers for this project. We conducted one-day workshops to get the citizen-scientists on this project up to speed on identification and collection of specimens. The project was a voucher-based project, meaning that all records had to be supported by either a specimen or a photograph.  The specimens now reside in the Maine State Museum.

The field work by volunteers began in 2005 and continued through 2017. Over 400 Maine citizen-scientists volunteered for this collaborative effort. A few notable records were accepted after the official end of the field season in 2017.

As we were winding down the project, the Maritime Butterfly Atlas (MBA) project was gearing up in the Maritime Provinces.  The MBS and MBA coordinators began conversations about merging our efforts into a single book to cover the region biogeographers call Acadia. We decided to collaborate. The result is the recently published Butterflies of Maine and Canadian Maritime Provinces, published by Cornell University Press.

If you would like to obtain a copy, I recommend purchasing directly from the Cornell University Press website because they are providing a 30% discount on the $34.95 purchase price.

Go here to start; https://cup.secure.longleafservices.org/cart?fcsid=16hi7ccg7hfoprh7l7k0s5n9nn Then click on the Proceed to Checkout button. There you will see a Discount box where you should type 09BCARD to get your discount.

The culture wars are prominent forces in our country. We see books being banned from school libraries. School curricula are designed to avoid or to accentuate controversial events in U. S. history. Confederate statues are being removed.

The culture wars spill over into science and nature study. Here’s a brief history of the current battle that is going on with bird names. When a new species of any organism is described, the taxonomist assigns the new species to a genus and creates a new species name. For example, Homo sapiens.

Many taxonomists honor or commemorate other scientists, colleagues or friends using an eponym for the species name. So, Calidris bairdii is the formal scientific name of Baird’s Sandpiper. The species name memorializes Spencer Fullerton Baird, who was a curator at the Smithsonian Institution for 37 years, serving as Secretary for nine years. The specimen holdings at the Smithsonian went from 6,000 specimens in 1850 to over two million when he retired in 1887. The eponym seems to be richly deserved.

Birds were one of the first groups of organisms to have standardized common names. It’s a lot easier to say you saw a Bonaparte’s Gull than it is to say you saw a Chroicocephalus philadelphia.

The American Ornithological Society (AOS) has a Check-list Committee that standardizes the common names of birds, making changes to reflect new findings into taxonomic relationships.

The committee endorses Baird’s Sandpiper as the common name of Calidris bairdii.  Sometimes an eponym is used for the common name that is not found in the scientific name. For instance, Catharus ustulatus has the common name of Swainson’s Thrush.

Some birders and ornithologists have pointed out that some eponyms are given to people with unsavory pasts. For instance, Bachman’s Warbler (likely extinct) and Bachman’s Sparrow were named after Reverend John Bachman, a slave owner and white supremacist. Should these eponyms be changed?

Bachman was a friend and colleague of John James Audubon. Audubon owned nine slaves when he lived in Kentucky and had other slaves when he lived in Louisiana. He and his wife Lucy opposed abolition.

Audubon’s eponyms include Audubon’s Shearwater, Audubon’s Oriole, and Audubon’s Warbler (now a subspecies of Yellow-rumped Warbler).  His name is also used in several nature societies including the National Audubon Society. That society recently completed a year-long process to consider removing Audubon’s name from the society name.

The ultimate decision was to retain the society’s name but local, large chapters in Seattle, Chicago and Washington, D. C. are changing their names to exclude Audubon. The Audubon Naturalists Society changed its name to Nature Forward. Maine Audubon is conducting a five-step process to examine this controversy.

In 2020, a petition signed by 182 birders and ornithologists was sent to the Check-list Committee of the AOS to urge changing of all eponyms that are reminders of oppression, slavery, and genocide. Since, then McCown’s Longspur has been changed to long-billed longspur because McCown was a confederate leader in the Civil War.

However, there are eponyms that are even more problematic. Scott’s Oriole is named for General Winfield Scott who oversaw the displacement of over 60,000 Native Americans from their homelands (the Trail of Tears). Thousands died in this forced march.

And where do we draw the line? What eponyms pass muster? Some have argued that removing all eponyms from common names is the way to go.

Kevin Winker, a University of Alaska ornithologist, analyzed the comments to two articles in the Washington Post, espousing the elimination of all eponymous common names of birds.

He analyzed the 340 comments to a 2020 article and found that negative comments outnumbered positive ones in a proportion of 3.36:1. Most readers thought eliminating eponyms was uncalled for. Winker found a ratio of 2.36 negative comments for every positive comment for a similar article in 2021.

A common sentiment from those opposed was that attention to this topic takes attention away from the many more pressing issues today that promote racism and inequality. Where do you stand?

Fall shorebird migration is well underway. The intertidal habitats in Maine are hosting legions of shorebirds that are passing through. Many of the species we are seeing now nested on the arctic tundra and are headed to wintering grounds in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.

Shorebird identification can be daunting. Shorebird enthusiasts scan flocks looking for a Western Sandpiper among the many Semipalmated Sandpipers or an American Golden-plover among the Black-bellied Plovers. It takes time and perseverance to identify many shorebirds. It is no wonder that a suite of six small sandpiper species is collectively referred to as peeps. Identifying such a shorebird as a peep is good enough for many birders.

I want to recommend observing the feeding behavior of shorebirds rather than dwelling on the nuances of identification. There is great variety in the ways these birds find food. Because shorebirds are awfully confiding, they will approach still observers, affording great views of through your binoculars.

Let’s start with the plovers. Take a look at the eyes of a Killdeer, a Semipalmated Plover of a Black-bellied Plover. They eyes are strikingly large. Plovers employ a run-and-peck method of feeding. Using their keen eyes, they look for disturbance of the sediment surface by the many invertebrates that live in sandflats and mudflats. When a clam spurts water or a polychaete worm (a segmented worm related to earthworms) sticks its head above the sediment surface, the plover will run rapidly and capture a snack.

Keep an eye out for foot-trembling by plovers. A plover will rapidly patter one leg on the surface of the mud or sand. The vibrations often induce an invertebrate to come to the surface where it is easily captured. The short bill of a plover serves its role adequately since prey are typically not captured at depth.

On to the sandpipers. All our peeps feed by inserting their relatively long bills into the sediment. The tip of the bill is richly endowed with touch receptors so prey are found by feel.

Sandpipers can open just the tip of their bill to capture prey. It is therefore easier for the bird to retract is bill from the sediment.

I love to watch foraging peep sandpipers. Many years ago, I studied the foraging behavior of Semipalmated Sandpipers in the upper Bay of Fundy. Most of these arctic-breeding birds wend their way to the Bay of Fundy each fall to fatten for a long migration to the Amazon delta in South America.

The sandpipers are attracted to the area by the abundance of a small crustacean called Corophium in the expansive intertidal flats. Corophium is about half an inch long. They live in U-shaped burrows in the mud and can attain densities of 5,000 per square foot. Lots of food for hungry sandpipers.

At low tide, I walked down into the intertidal zone and found a place to stand near foraging birds. They frequently walked right past me so I could easily watch their feeding. About every third or fourth probe, a sandpiper would successfully capture a Corophium. I could see the Corophium splaying its seven pairs of legs as it struggled to escape the bill of the bird. It was easy to see a gulp in the throat of the bird as it swallowed the prey. Give this technique a try.

Sanderlings use taste to find areas in the sand or mud where their prey are found. Researchers prepared sediment with no prey and sediment where prey had been allowed to live to season the sediment but were then removed. In the lab, Sanderlings probed more often in the sediment where prey had been.

Short-billed Dowitchers and Stilt Sandpipers forage in water up to their bellies while rapidly probing in a behavior know as stitching.

Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs wander in shallow water using their long bills to stab at prey, much like a heron.

One of the great joys of spring in Maine is hearing the song of a newly arrived White-throated Sparrow. It’s distinctive poor–sam–peabody–peabody -peabody (or as our northern neighbors prefer, my–sweet–Canada–Canada–Canada) evokes the Maine woods. We are treated to this song all summer long.

I had to grin when I recently heard a song that sounded vaguely like a White-throated Sparrow but with a certain hesitancy and missed notes. What I was hearing was a young male, born just a few months ago, learning to sing.

About 60% of birds belong to a single order, the perching birds, or passerines. That order is split into two major groups: the songbirds or oscines, and the suboscines. The songbirds include virtuosos like thrushes, Ruby-crowned Kinglets, warblers, sparrows, orioles, and many others. In Maine, flycatchers are the only suboscines we have. There is far more suboscine diversity in the tropics. But all suboscine males sing very simple songs. Think of the fee-bee of the Eastern Phoebe, the che-bek of the Least Flycatcher or the sneezy fitz-bew of a Willow Flycatcher.

The songs of suboscines are innate. No learning is required for an Alder Flycatcher to sing its fee-bee-o song. The ability of a suboscine to sing its specific song is encoded in its genes. In contrast, in at least 31 families of songbirds, males (and females in those species in which females sing) must be tutored.

Young songbird males raised in isolation do not learn to sing their species’ characteristic song properly. They will sing but it is hardly recognizable to us. Certainly, females of that species will not be enticed to size up such a male and consider mating with the song-challenged male.

Song learning in songbirds is a huge area of research and we know much about the process. Researchers have identified distinctive stages in song learning. The first, called the early critical period, begins in the nest, and continues for at least several weeks. The brain of the young bird is receptive to the songs of adult males. In most cases, the tutor is the dad of the young bird but not always. For example, Bewick’s Wrens in the western United States first learn their father’s song but then modify it by learning the songs of neighboring adults when it begins to nest.

This period is an important window. A bird isolated for the first part of its life and then exposed to adult song after the early critical period will not be able to learn songs. It will still sing but the song is rudimentary.

The next stage is called the silent period. During this time, the songs heard in the early critical period are fixed in the brain of the bird.

Then, the young bird advances to the subsong stage. The song I recently heard was an example of subsong. The bird was doing its best to recreate the song it had learned and fixed in its brain earlier. This stage is quite like babbling in human babies. Sounds are being tested. Some ornithologists refer to these song attempts as whisper song because of the low volume of the sounds.

The final stage is the plastic song stage. Having developed some facility with singing the proper notes and phrases, the bird achieves the ability to sing an honest-to-goodness rendition of the song of its species. As any musician knows, practice makes perfect.

The bird I heard was clearly in the subsong stage. He may return next year to lift my spirits with a full-throated, poor-sam-peabody-peabody-peabody song.

You may wonder why songbirds don’t learn the songs of other species of birds in the area. Ornithologists have identified an innate auditory template in birds. This template is genetically inherited and provides a bird with the ability to recognize the sounds of its own species and filter out the songs of other birds and frogs as well as sounds like waterfalls and ATVs.