‘Hope’ is becoming increasingly familiar with this blog. Not just because we do our darndest  to be optimistic (and several conservation gains in Canada’s boreal in the past few years have affirmed this right—including recent good news in Quebec). But because one amazing Whimbrel named Hope has provided much joy for this blog over the past few years.

For those of you unfamiliar with Hope, she’s a Whimbrel that was outfitted with a satellite tracker in 2009 through a joint research project between the Center for Conservation Biology and the Nature Conservancy. They’ve been able to track her migration movements ever since, including what will become her third successful round trip between her breeding grounds in the Mackenzie River Delta in Canada and her wintering grounds on St. Croix of the U.S. Virgin Islands once she reaches her summer habitat later this spring.

Map of Hope’s migration since spring of 2009 (click to enlarge)
Credit: Center for Conservation Biology

Whimbrel migration has always been difficult for scientists to understand. Although their summer breeding grounds, wintering habitat and migratory stopover habitat have been documented, connecting which Whimbrels use which habitats (and how they get there) has not been easy. At least until this project commenced. We’ve blogged updates on Hope and several of her partners in the program—some of which have been less fortunate—on several occasions, during which she’s traversed thousands of miles and navigated around several nasty storms, including one hurricane. Here are a few of them:

-Tracking Hope, the Whimbrel (8/20/09)

-Hope Spotted on St. Croix (8/28/09)

-Boreal Shorebirds Killed in the Caribbean (10/20/11)

-Hope Returns (4/9/12)

Hope (and the program overall) not only helps scientists better understand Whimbrels, she also puts a face on migration and conservation for everyday birders like you and I. There can sometimes be a disconnect between the nitty-gritty science and data collection and the simple joy of watching birds. Hope and the other Whimbrels in this program help bridge that gap, blending science with the fun and excitement of individual birds themselves.

Adding to the fun and exciting element of this program, I think you might enjoy this video about Hope and her participation in this program. It explains the program overall and follows Hope throughout her various migration adventures and obstacles. She’s had quite a ride since first being tracked, and we think you’ll have one too when you watch this great video!

What happens when you combine a hungry Eagle Owl and a high-speed HD camera?

A remarkable glimpse of what the last seconds of life looks like for many voles…

Note: this isn’t particularly new, but I thought I would share it in case you haven’t come across it yet. The last few seconds gave me goosebumps…

Two seed-loving birds that breed up north in the boreal taiga and arctic tundra, the Snow Bunting and Common Redpoll, paid visit to our colleague Valerie Courtois of the Canadian Boreal Initiative recently. She lives way up in Goose Bay, Labrador, so they likely spent their winter down in southern Canada or the northern US and are now on their trip north for summer breeding.

Despite the massive heat wave that hit much of the East Coast in March, Labrador still had a decent amount of snow on the ground in recent weeks. This of course did not deter the buntings or redpolls whatsoever – they particularly loved her feeder and the seeds that fell down into the snow below, as you can see in the pictures.

Thanks to Val for sharing these lovely shots with us!

Jeff was recently out on vacation, so I thought I would post about an interesting article I came across last week about some of the lesser-known values trees and forests provide. Hope you enjoy…

-David

Trees in Canada’s boreal forest
Credit: Garth Lenz

Trees, trees, and more trees. It’s hard to picture yourself embedded within a landscape of trees and not feel content (save, perhaps, an accidental turn down a trail and becoming lost). Whether it’s a remote part of the rugged wilderness or a casual stroll through a local park, being around trees simply makes us feel better.

Don’t just take my word for it, though. Studies have been conducted on the influences trees (and general greenery) have on us, and have generally found that when we have more trees and plants near us in everyday life, we tend to be better and happier people. One study, conducted in an inner-city housing development, even found that adding more trees and greenery to the area created numerous positive effects, including improved self-discipline, increased optimism, lower crime rates, and even better concentration among children with ADD.

Our collective awareness of the less-than-obvious benefits trees provide, not just for us humans but for our entire environment, grew last week with a great op-ed in the New York Times. The author, Jim Robbins, highlighted some of the lesser-known things trees do that often have far-reaching effects.

For example, a few decades ago a Japanese scientist found that when leaves decompose, they release acids which eventually drain into the ocean. These acids help fertilize plankton, one of the most basic and common sources of food within oceanic food chains. This in turn helps maintain healthier populations of a number of species as those nutrients work their way up the food web. Even some fishermen have caught on and saw fish stocks improve upon replanting efforts near streams and coastlines, according to the piece.

Interesting connection – acids released by decomposing tree leaves trickle down to the ocean and spur plankton populations. These help sustain krill, the main diet of humback whales.
Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

The article continues on with several other fascinating facts about trees, including creating a cooling effect in cities on hot days and the absorption of toxins released through agriculture.

For me personally, I’m content with just liking trees for trees. As a child, I watched my father fight a local timber company and zoning officials to prevent our small rural road from becoming yet another in our area riddled with ugly clearcuts. He ultimately lost, and still to this day (nearly 20 years later) it still looks nothing close to the beautiful stretch of forest it once was.  It wasn’t about the greenhouse gasses that were released when the trees were logged, the loss of prime habitat for many of the beautiful creatures we share our woods with, or my newfound inability to go wild mushroom hunting in it (there were thankfully other spots up the road).

It was about the purely aesthetic bliss I felt every time I drove through it. The zen you get when you can’t see any lights or people, only the whisk of the wind as it dances its way through the trees accompanied by the occasional sweet song of a songbird. While the noise and people are now long gone, the scarred earth they left behind still pains me every time I drive through there. It was thus a no-brainer to accept my current job with this organization to help educate people about Canada’s boreal forest, or “North America’s bird nursery” as some of us like to call it.

But not everyone has as easy of a time valuing nature just for nature’s sake. And even for many that do, the temptation of economic profit is simply too strong to fight off.

However, the more we learn about trees and how they benefit us all (especially ones that correlate to economic or individual health), the lower the temptation of short-term profit becomes. It may inspire us to cut trees in a more sustainable way. It may get more people interested in tree planting programs or cleaning up parks.

It seems the more we learn about trees, the more integral they become to the health of us as individuals and as a society.

In our last post we highlighted the Northern Waterthrush – a small bird frequently found in mangroves throughout the Caribbean that heavily relies on the boreal forest up north for summer breeding.

Hope, in her wintering grounds in St. Croix
Credit: Lisa Yntema

Another bird that shares such mangrove habitat and also heavily relies on the boreal for breeding (mostly near the Arctic and Hudson Bay coastlines) is the Whimbrel. This festive shorebird is known for its stocky figure, fearless defense of its nest and its long migratory journeys, not uncommonly exceeding 1,000 miles non-stop.

Whimbrels in particular have increasingly seen the public spotlight over the past few years thanks to a program outfitting Whimbrels with satellite tracking devices. This program has yielded great results and in helping to understand Whimbrel migration and behavior. We’ve blogged on several occasions about these birds, namely Hope (here and here), Machi and Goshen (here), who were unfortunately killed by hunters last year in Guadaloupe.

As saddening as the deaths of Machi and Goshen were, Hope seems to be embodying her name well. She’s made three successful round trips back and forth between the Mackenzie River Delta and St. Croix so far and recently begun her spring trip back up to Canada, stopping in Virginia last week after a 1,600 mile, 60 hour flight from St. Croix.

You can see in Hope’s migration map below that she is very loyal to her summer breeding grounds in the Mackenzie River Delta in Canada and wintering grounds of Great Pond (an Important Bird Area) in St. Croix in the Caribbean. She also appears to have several favored stopover habitats in Virginia and around Hudson Bay.

Here’s a recent press release outlining some of her history and recent trip:

(Williamsburg, VA)—Hope, a whimbrel carrying a satellite transmitter, has returned to the Eastern Shore of Virginia after spending the winter on St. Croix in the U.S. Virginia Islands.  The bird has been tracked by a team of researchers through her migratory travels since she was captured on Box Tree Creek in Northampton County, Virginia on 19 May, 2009.  Since that time she has traveled more than 44,100 miles (71,000 kilometers) back and forth 3 times between breeding grounds on the MacKenzie River in western Canada and Great Pond Important Bird Area on St. Croix.  She likely left Great Pond on the evening of April 1st and arrived in Virginia on the morning of April 4th, covering the 1600 miles in approximately 60 hours.  She had been wintering on Great Pond since September 14, 2011.

Hope has taught the research community a great deal about the migratory pathways and habits of whimbrels.  She has made tremendous nonstop flights, moved great distances out over the open Atlantic, confronted storms while at sea, navigated with precision to stopover sites and shown high fidelity to her breeding site, her wintering site, and several staging areas.  Hope is one of more than a dozen birds that have been tracked in a collaborative effort between The Center for Conservation Biology, The Nature Conservancy and other partners designed to discover migratory routes that connect breeding and winter areas and to identify en route migratory staging areas that are critical to the conservation of this declining species.

Let’s hope she continues to stay strong and healthy during the remainder of her trip back up north!

David

Northern Waterthrush
Credit: Brian E. Small

The Great Bird Current is flowing north and picking up volume as more and more boreal birds leave their wintering grounds on their way to the boreal forest of Canada and Alaska. They come from South America, Central America, the Caribbean, the southern U.S. and Mexico, with the largest number passing through the Texas and Gulf Coast region where so-called “fall-outs” of spring migrants can often be astonishing in the diversity and abundance of birds. In the movie The Big Year, there is a scene that is supposed to portray one of these fall-outs at one of the most famous locations for this phenomenon, High Island, Texas. Some elements of that segment of the movie are a bit unrealistic perhaps but, still, the crux of the phenomena and the excitement of the birders is true to life.

One of the species that is just starting to arrive in small numbers in the southern U.S. from its wintering grounds in the Caribbean basin is the Northern Waterthrush—a species in which more than half of its global population breeds in the boreal forest. Northern Waterthrushes breed across the entire boreal region from Alaska across Canada to Newfoundland, and because they have a loud, obvious song they are one of the easier warblers to document as being in a particular place. That does not mean, however, that they are necessarily very easy to see because they love to stay low and hidden away in thick scrambles of brush in wet, soggy, buggy and often inaccessible locations. I was lucky to get this short video of one out in the open in its breeding grounds along the George River of northern Quebec in August of 2010:

Most often I just hear them. Here are some recordings I have made of them from various parts of Canada’s boreal forest:

Short clip of single song from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories with the loud “peeps” of Green-winged Teal:

Northern Waterthrush-Yellowknife-June 9 2009 by BirdWells

A dawn chorus clip from along the Albany River in northern Ontario. See if you can pick out the Northern Waterthrush among the other birds:

Ontario Boreal Birds-Jun22-2008-Albany River by BirdWells

A scratchy recording of one from George River, Quebec from the same location as the video above:

Northern Waterthrush-Indian House Lake-George River-Quebec-Aug 12 2010 by BirdWells

When I am trying to teach people about where Northern Waterthrushes spend the winter I like to call them “mangrove warblers” since, as my made-up-name suggests, they are very common in hot, steamy, buggy and tangled thickets of mangroves in the Caribbean basin. There they don’t sing but they do give their emphatic “chink” call notes to give themselves away. When I was in Aruba this past November I saw lots of them in the mangroves and nearby shrubs on that island, which is just off the northwest coast of Venezuela. Here is a video that I filmed of a very shy Northern Waterthrush on Aruba back in November:

The way that birds like the Northern Waterthrush interconnect the nations and natural ecosystems of the Americas is astounding, as literally billions of birds travel back and forth between the boreal forest breeding grounds and the wintering grounds that extend as far south as southern South America. We highlighted much new research about these interconnections and other interesting facts in the book released last November “Boreal Birds of North America: A Hemispheric View of Their Conservation Links and Significance” if any of you are interested in learning more!

Smokestacks and tailpipes aren’t the only major source of emissions.
Credit: Wikimedia user: Dori

Although most people envision smokestacks and tailpipe exhaust when thinking about greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation is an often underreported component of our human contribution to climate change. Most estimates place carbon emissions from deforestation at somewhere between 12-25% of all human emissions at the global scale.

A recent New York Times blog highlighted the growing field of carbon storage mapping, in this instance an interesting new map by the Woods Hole Research Center that focuses on vegetative height throughout the tropics. This type of analysis can provide estimates for carbon density within tropical areas where the majority of stored carbon lies in the vegetation itself.

It also mentioned the importance of boreal forests further north—which actually store more carbon than tropical forests—but this type of analysis (vegetative height) doesn’t work as well due to the fact that much of the boreal’s carbon is below ground in the soils and wetlands. This doesn’t mean that logging has less of an impact in the boreal, however. The soils and wetlands following logging will often either dry out or become permanently altered, thus releasing carbon.

Log pile in Canada’s boreal forest.
Credit: Garth Lenz

While this type of research is probably more alluring to climate scientists and policy wonks, the impacts of this growing research field could yield far-ranging benefits to birds and birders.

The purpose of measuring carbon storage and density is primarily to increase incentives to preserve forests from deforestation. This is great for birds for two reasons: 1) preserving more forested areas and wetlands from development will inevitably preserve important bird habitat, and 2) it will help slow climate change, which has already been found to be impacting birds.

Some governments have already started taking this seriously.

To the south, Brazil has taken measures to reduce deforestation in recent years with climate change being cited as one of the primary factors. Recent studies indicate it has already started working.

Up north, Manitoba has committed to a boreal peatlands stewardship strategy to help protect Manitoba’s vast and lush forests and wetlands. These areas are dense with not only carbon, but birds. Some of North America’s most threatened migrants, including the Rusty Blackbird and Olive-sided Flycatcher, breed and thrive in these insect-rich habitats. Ontario and Quebec have both pledged to preserve half of their northern boreal forests, with climate change weighing in as an important factor.

Olive-sided Flycatcher I filmed in Manitoba

These two forests—the Amazon and the Boreal—are some of the most important habitats for migratory birds. The Amazon (and many of the tropical forests in Central America, the Caribbean and other parts of South America) are widely used by migrants during the winter. Many of these birds will subsequently fly up to the boreal to breed during the summer, often stopping along the way to our great benefit.

So the better experts and politicians understand the importance of forests in climate change—and thus the need to preserve them—the better news it is for birds and us birders alike.

Today is World Water Day. With high temperatures scorching much of the United States and Canada many of you may be turning World Water Day into World Water Park Day, but regardless of how you spend it we should all spend a minute to appreciate the ultimate source of life on earth.

The UN’s theme this year is water and food security. Indeed, this is an important connection to highlight. Water doesn’t just quench our thirst, it also produces the food we eat. But it’s not all equal. For instance, it requires 15,000 litres of water (4,000 gallons) to produce one pound of beef whereas only 1,500 litres (400 gallons) of water is needed to produce a pound of wheat. This poses serious questions about what we eat and the impacts we may or may not be aware of each time we step into a grocery store. With climate change projected to widen the gap between weather extremes (in this case droughts and floods), this poses serious risks to food security and water health all around the world.

Perhaps there is no greater area of hope, however, than Canada’s boreal forest—my particular area of interest. The boreal is blessed with millions of pristine lakes, thousands of free-flowing rivers, and an abundance of peatlands and wetlands that help combat climate change by sequestering and storing carbon. Hundreds of Aboriginal communities benefit from food created by boreal water and many rely on its lakes and rivers for transportation where no roads exist.

Willard Bitton of Poplar River First Nation relies on rivers to navigate to his fall moose hunting grounds.
Credit: Garth Lenz

This water isn’t just good for indigenous communities and our atmosphere. The abundance of water is part of what makes the boreal such a popular breeding ground for migratory birds. Millions of waterfowl make good use of the lakes and rivers each summer, and the abundance of insects—in some places so dense they’ve become infamous to humans—attract a wide variety of songbirds eager to fill up and provide for their young. Many of the birds that pass through your neighborhood each spring and fall are likely on their way to or from the boreal. Although much of the southern boreal forest has been degraded, there are large expanses in the north still untouched by the human footprint, providing enormous opportunities for conservation.

It’s important on days like today to recognize both the good and the bad. The bad news is water and food security remains uncertain in many parts of the world. The good news is there are still places in the world like the boreal that retain healthy natural water systems which allow wildlife—and humans—to flourish.

Recent warm temperatures are causing some birds to migrate early.
Credit: Garth Lenz

Across New England and southeastern Canada we are experiencing incredibly warm March temperatures—today (March 21) it is nearly 80 degrees F in Maine (that’s about 26 Celsius) when normally we might expect temperatures perhaps in the 40-50 F range!

Birds have been arriving early in many parts of the northeast including here in Maine as you can read here:

A Birder’s Take on Signs of Spring in Maine:
http://blog.nrcm.org/2012/03/a-birders-take-on-early-spring.html

Please let us know if you are seeing any differences in arrival dates of birds in your area.

Of course, climate change is having and will continue to have expected and unexpected major implications for birds other wildlife and the people of the boreal region and whether or not this current very warm weather is a sign of things to come, the trend is clear.

Here are some links to background about climate change and birds in Canada and more broadly:

Our BSI webpage on Climate Change and Birds:
http://www.borealbirds.org/globalwarmingbirds.shtml

Nature Canada’s Climate Change and Birds:
http://www.naturecanada.ca/climate_change_birds.asp

Delta Marsh, Manitoba study of spring arrival dates of birds:
http://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/bitstream/1993/3025/1/Murphy-Klassen_Long-term_trends.pdf

Impacts of Climate Change to Wildlife in Ontario:
https://ozone.scholarsportal.info/bitstream/1873/13137/1/275634.pdf

Natural Resources Canada 2001 annotated bibliography on effects of climate change on birds:
http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-sciences/projdb/pdf/69_e.pdf

Use of Cornell and Audubon’s Ebird data to study arrival dates of birds:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0031662

Book chapter co-authored  by International Boreal Science Panelist Terry Root on Implications of Climate Change for Wildlife:
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Overview(1-56).pdf

Long-distance migrants may be most impacted in very seasonal habitats:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1685/1259.full

It’s truly been the week of the waxwing here at BSI. Just a day after Gary’s wife Bette spotted a group of Bohemian Waxwings feasting on crabapples outside their home in Edmonton, Jeff spotted a solitary waxwing outside his home in Maine perched in a…you guessed it…crabapple tree! He was able to snag a quick shot (camera, of course) as well as a nice video of the lone waxwing stopping by his home. Here’s to even more spring visitors in 2012!

Credit: Jeff Wells