Round Robin

Your Funky Nest Could Win a Prize—Submit by July 15

Hugh — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:12:02 +0000

With breeding season in full swing, birds are in a flurry of nesting—that means it’s time for another Funky Nests in Funky Places contest held by our Celebrate Urban Birds project—and you could win prizes for yours.

Birds don’t always build in the places you might expect. People have discovered bird nests in boots, grills, flower pots, traffic signals, fence posts, rakes, old tires, and all manner of assorted odd places. Part of the fun of watching birds is seeing the imaginative places they decide to call home. Visit the project website to see some examples of some truly funky nests from past years, and get inspired.

“If there’s a funky nest in your neighborhood, we want to know about it,” said project leader Karen Purcell. “You can send in a photo or video, write a story, produce some artwork or a dance—use any creative way you can think of to show or describe a bird’s nest in a funky place.”

Many prizes are being offered, including binoculars, regional bird-sound audio guides, waterproof field guides, bird journals, bird notepads, and bird game cards. Children’s picture books by Henry Cole and the book “Sparrow” by Kim Todd will also be awarded.

How to participate:
1. Email your entry to urbanbirds@cornell.edu
2. Write your FirstName_LastName_City_State_FUNKY2012 in the subject line
3. Include your address in the body of the email
4. Please explain where the photo was taken and the name of the bird if you know it
5. Read and agree to the terms and conditions of the Challenge

We’re looking forward to your entry—just remember that the deadline for entries is July 15, 2012.

(Image: Dawna Van Overschelde of South Dakota found this American Robin’s nest on a wooden fence.)

World Series results: Epic day of migration finds Cornell Lab teams at front of pack

Hugh — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:41:49 +0000

With hordes of migrant songbirds fluttering in the bushes of southern New Jersey on Saturday, two Cornell teams posted strong finishes in the 29th annual World Series of Birding. The student Redheads team scored 168 species with their new lineup, enough to take second place in the Cape May County division. And the bicycle-powered Anti-Petrels netted 164 species while riding 102 miles, winning the Carbon Footprint Challenge for the third straight year.

But on a day like Saturday, that winning feeling was spread liberally throughout the competition. Birders walked into Sunday’s brunch still reeling and bemused from the onslaught of warblers, thrushes, grosbeaks, and orioles they’d seen—a daylong kaleidoscope of blue, yellow, black, orange, red, and green flashing from the bushes. Almost every team, when asked how their day went, summed it up the way Redheads captain Hope Batcheller did, saying “It was just a really phenomenal day; we had a blast. Several people on the team were like, ‘That’s the best day of birding I’ve ever had.’”

If you ask me, that potential for surprise is why people participate in this conservation fundraiser—to witness a natural spectacle that can occur on a scale that people can scarcely imagine. It can occur, but it’s not guaranteed to occur, and that’s what turns people into bird watchers and conservationists. Serendipity is a feature of nature—it’s the thing that sets natural entertainments apart from the digital and the electronic. A favorite movie is the same every time you watch it. A favorite walk in the woods is different every time, and in that difference is the magic of the world.

Redheads score “phenomenal” day

For the Redheads, good omens arrived before dawn, with a Long-eared Owl and Least Bittern in Tuckahoe marsh. By the time they hit Cape May point at dawn there were “five or ten warblers in every bush,” Hope said (including the aptly named but uncommon Cape May Warbler). An odd call emanating from a grassy field led them not just to a Dickcissel—another coveted mark on the day’s checklist—but also a Bobolink, perched right next to it.

The best days often include a painful miss, but even this had a touch of good humor to it. One of only a handful of Cattle Egrets in southern New Jersey lives right next door to the Redheads’ motel. On Friday it was the first bird they saw on their way out the door, but on Saturday it refused to show. On Sunday morning the egret was right out front on the lawn again, bright and early.

Hope was happy with the performance of the young team and with their route, though she said next year the team might try to time their visits to the coast to hit a tide that produces better shorebirds. The team will have one other hurdle as well: they’ll probably need a new captain, as Hope has plans to study tropical ecology in Costa Rica next spring. But several crackerjack young birders have enrolled at Cornell for next year. This year there was an application process to select team members; next year the students may actually field two teams (the Anti-Petrels want to get them interested in a student bike team).

Anti-Petrels cycle to 164 species

The Anti-Petrels pedaled a similar route to last year but scored a full 20 additional species—evidence of just how blisteringly hot the migration had been the previous night. I’m a member of the team, and the day certainly goes down in my mind as an endless stream of good luck, good weather, and good looks at great birds.

Our highlights included a Black Rail heard in the far distance at Jake’s Landing around 1:30 a.m. Team captain France Dewaghe, who has very sharp ears, picked it out from the background of Whip-poor-will and Marsh Wren calls, but it took a full 15 minutes for Charles Eldermire and me to hear it well enough to count it. Fortunately, the bird was unperturbable and kept calling the whole time. Every so often, I imagine, it turned its tiny bill (these birds are no bigger than tennis balls) toward us and that’s when we heard its unmistakeable kee-kee-kerrr.

I always tell myself never to doubt France’s ears—he’s like Radar O’Reilly on M*A*S*H*, calling out “Louisiana Waterthrush!” or “Prothonotary Warbler!” moments before the rest of us hear the song. But twice that morning we heard strange warbler songs loud and clear—eventually they turned out to belong to a Northern Waterthrush and a Canada Warbler, two species we had never recorded in previous years.

The waterthrush, and the cloud of Magnolia Warblers and Northern Parulas that surrounded it, was our first clue that we were on to an epic day of migration. King Rails called from many of the marshes we rode by; a very rare Black-necked Stilt landed in our main shorebird spot at 5:30 a.m., near a valuable Little Blue Heron and Stilt Sandpiper. Two unusual vireos, Blue-headed and Warbling, showed up in trees virtually next to each other, as well as our World Series nemesis bird, the Rose-breasted Grosbeak, which warbled sweetly from a high branch. The birding was so good that we even managed to find Magnolia Warblers singing dead-on Chestnut-sided Warbler songs—unfortunate actually, since we never did find an actual Chestnut-sided for our list. We left Heislerville at just after 9 a.m. with 112 species on our list.

Our low point came at lunchtime, when we made a special side trip to boost our chances for Gull-billed Tern. We’d seen them there in the driving rain on Wednesday, but the only terns that appeared were slender, long-tailed Forster’s Terns hunting fish from the river channels. We ate Nutella and privately wondered if our luck had turned. One mile down the road, France rode over a broken bottle and we had our second flat of the day (the first had come at 2:30 a.m.).

We got back on track on our way out to the great saltmarshes of Avalon and Nummy Island. The Cattle Egret that eluded the Redheads kindly showed up for us, and so did Yellow-crowned Night-Herons, Whimbrels, American Oystercatchers, and a welcome Common Loon. Red Knots positively glowed in the afternoon light. Our scopes even picked up the glossy backs of horseshoe crabs mating in the shallow water—their eggs are the reason the knots stop here every spring. We even spent a couple of spare minutes watching a Peregrine Falcon flying steep U-shaped dives at another peregrine on the ground, possibly trying to steal a kill.

Our day ended with one more disappointment—no Parasitic Jaegers were to be found harrying terns in the tidal rips off Cape May Point—but this was buttressed by a good run of swallows and an American Crow calling on an island filled with Fish Crows. We finished the day amid the thick mosquitoes of Higbee Beach, scoring Purple Sandpipers alongside Ruddy Turnstones on the rocks and hearing a Barred Owl calling from the woods—the one regular bird species we had missed in the morning. As usual, France heard it first.

Everyone here at the Cornell Lab would like to thank all our sponsors, donors, and supporters for being with us during this Big Day season—from Carl Zeiss Sports Optics and their support of Team Sapsucker, to Bob’s Red Mill and the yummy granola that kept our pedals turning on Saturday, and the many of you who donated, followed us on Facebook, and cheered us on. Thank you.

And if you’re curious about what it’s like to ride bikes and go birding, here’s a short time-lapse of the last couple of miles out to Cape May Meadows and then to Higbee Beach for sunset…

Scouting Day 2: How to Scout for Warblers in New Jersey

Hugh — Fri, 11 May 2012 03:30:24 +0000

Here in New Jersey, the Anti-Petrels spent the morning refining our route for the dawn hours of the World Series of Birding on Saturday. The students of Team Redhead scouted saltmarshes, then headed inland to Belleplain State Forest’s warblers, tanagers, and woodpeckers before hitting Cape May to look for shorebirds and a rare Mississippi Kite. This close to the event, both teams are finalizing their routes, trying to link together the species they need without sinking too much time into travel.

Since we’re a bike-powered team, we have to minimize the amount of back-and-forth riding we do, particularly in the early morning when birds are most active and vocal. A 10-mile side trip by car isn’t a huge investment—but for us it’s close to an hour out of our day. So how do you balance all these concerns? Here’s a look at how our plan for warblers is coming together.

Warblers are one of the main attractions of spring birding—they’re brilliant, frenetic little jewels that come in a great variety, from the ubiquitous, like the Yellow or Yellow-rumped, to skulkers that you long to see, such as Cerulean, Connecticut, and others. Eastern North America has some 40 species of warblers, most of which are at least theoretically possible in southern New Jersey in mid-May. So if you’re looking to stretch your day’s bird list, warblers are essential to focus on. [Watch a Lab video about birding for warblers.]

We’re hoping to record somewhere between 12 and 30 species of warblers on Saturday. To make the task manageable, first we divide them into two categories: resident species that breed in southern New Jersey, and migrants that pass through. The difference between the two groups exemplifies the balance of patience vs serendipity it takes to make a big day work.

The two groups of birds behave differently: residents arrived a while ago and are spread out across the state. As long as we can find them, they’ll stay in the same place from day to day and (usually) sing late into the day. Residents in this part of the state include Yellow-throated, Hooded, Kentucky, Black-and-white, Prairie, Prothonotary, and nine other species. If we can get them all that’s 15 species on our quest for 150 or more total birds for the day—so it’s well worth putting in time to find singing males. This year, we’re worried about Kentucky Warblers, which seem even scarcer than usual. And we always worry about Louisiana Waterthrush: last year we burned 30 minutes waiting for a normally reliable bird to show up. (It never did.)

On the plus side, once we’ve found these breeding birds we can visit them later in the morning, since it takes less luck to find them. That frees up the most active hours (until about 8 a.m.) to look for birds we can’t predict: the migrants. These birds are on their way through the state to breeding grounds farther north. They fly at night, land to refuel for a day or two, and then head on out. The best way to find them is to look early in the morning in low, wooded habitat near the southern tip of the state—which is one reason why Cape May is a world-famous birding spot.

Migrants on a big day are a little like a bonus roll in Yahtzee—we know we’ll get some migrants to add to our base list, but it’s hard to know how many. Among the possibilities are Black-throated Green, Black-throated Blue, Chestnut-sided, Blackpoll, Blackburnian, and 10 others. Last year the World Series fell during a streak of poor migrant weather; we got only the most reliable of these including Black-throated Green, Black-throated Blue, and Blackpoll. But this year, the weather is looking more promising. Yesterday’s storm brought winds from the south (and several Mississippi Kites). Fair weather the next two days, coupled with winds from the west, could encourage a new wave of migrants to cross the bay from Delaware. As Redheads captain Hope Batcheller cautiously predicted in an email, “Migrants are going to be TOTALLY BOSS!!!”

So we spent the morning doing the next best thing to scouting migrants—and that’s scouting migrant habitat. Lots of car-powered teams head straight to Cape May for this; it’s one of the best migrant spots on the Eastern Seaboard. But on our bikes, we need to find our migrants within just a mile or two of where we’ll be at dawn, and also near Heislerville, our shorebird mecca (where we found a Stilt Sandpiper this morning, as well as two Peregrine Falcons. After a morning of searching, we found a grove of low trees, brush, and grasses near the bayshore. And the early results were promising: on an otherwise slow migrant day we found Blackpoll Warbler, Magnolia Warbler, Swainson’s Thrush, Scarlet Tanager, a migrating Eastern Wood-Pewee, and two lingering White-throated Sparrows.

Armed with a good plan for our morning, we’re back to looking for nighttime prospects such as Clapper and King rails, Least Bittern, Seaside and Swamp sparrows, and three owls (Great Horned, Barred, Eastern Screech). After jouncing down a washboarded road we’re deep inside Tuckahoe marsh. It’s a clear night with stars and city lights visible across the moonless reaches—and unfortunately very quiet. As I type, my teammates, France and Charles, bundle up against the chill and walk the road. But all they can hear is frogs. Night scouting has become the next thing to worry about. But thankfully, all the scouting will be over in about 24 hours, when the World Series begins. Thanks to everyone for following along!

(Thanks to Bob’s Red Mill for sponsoring the Anti-Petrels and Carl Zeiss Sports Optics for helping equip the Redheads. You can donate to support the teams here. Photos by Hugh Powell except Peregrine Falcon, by France Dewaghe.)

Scouting Day 1: Warblers, Sandpipers, Herons, and Rain

Hugh — Thu, 10 May 2012 01:54:47 +0000

Lots of bird watchers are obsessive about their hobby, but we still usually regard it as an optional pursuit: when it rains, we’re allowed to stay indoors. But with the World Series of Birding just three days away, our teams—the student Redheads and the bike-powered Anti-Petrels—didn’t really have that option today. Starting at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, we’ll be spending 24 hours counting as many bird species as we can find to raise money for conservation work. So we need to do our homework.

My Anti-Petrels teammates and I were camping at Belleplain State Forest, and I tracked the progress of the night by the volume of raindrops on my tent fly. They kept getting louder. By the light of morning it was clear the rain was here to stay. But even so, the resident forest birds were singing—an Ovenbird crept through the leaf litter in front of Charles’s tent, then launched into its incredibly loud song. Dogwood blossoms lay on the ground like white confetti, knocked to earth by the rain. Eastern Wood-Pewees wailed in the soggy distance. We brewed three cups of coffee and headed out to see what else was around.

We ran into the Redheads almost immediately. The Lab’s student team were spread along the road listening to Acadian Flycatchers at the traditional haunt of a Louisiana Waterthrush pair. Hope Batcheller, the captain, stood with our captain, France Dewaghe, trading notes on Kentucky Warblers and Summer Tanagers. Her ponytail was dripping. Eric Gulson raised his binoculars at a wall of leaves all twitching with raindrops. He had spied something. Ten minutes later, the waterthrush sang, and we all went on our way.

At a nearby wildlife refuge a Green Heron searched for minnows among thousands of Short-billed Dowitchers, Semipalmated Sandpipers, and Dunlin, a couple of hundred Semipalmated Plovers, and one Ruddy Turnstone. (Among this mixture, it’s imperative on Saturday that we find at least one White-rumped Sandpiper.) The heron’s orange legs flashed above the little shorebirds, which gave it plenty of room—just in case the bird acquired a taste for feathers, it seemed.

We drove out to the beach, but fog enveloped Cape May and visibility was dropping by the hour. By the time we reached the famous Meadows, we could barely see the nesting Piping Plovers inside their predator-safe enclosures. We scoped down the beach and saw the Redheads valiantly peering into the misty waves. Purple Martins emerged out of the mist and sparring Least Terns vanished into it.

People often point out that the World Series of Birding isn’t well-named, since it’s not a series of competitions. But spend some time with a team during Scout Week and it’s apparent that this is both a scramble and an endurance event. A team’s performance on the contest day has a lot to do with how they spend the days leading up to it: how many route variations they’ve tried; how many waking hours they’ve spent scouting dawn locations, night spots, migrant traps, low-tide mudflats and high-tide beaches; and how they’ve balanced patience against luck—the willingness to wait for known birds to appear against the spontaneity to follow the unexpected when it appears in the corner of your eye.

Though we didn’t have a classically great birding day today, we did get some clues about how to refine our route and hopefully top our previous high total of 150 species (the Redheads have a career high of 187 species to shoot for in their category within Cape May County).

The bad weather is supposed to blow through tonight, and a new set of migrants may fly in along with the change—upping the scouting ante for Thursday and Friday. Tomorrow morning at dawn we’ll be in the low woods around the town of Heislerville, listening for the chips of warblers that a month ago were in Mexico. But tonight, after a brief stop in camp, we’re heading out to scout a promising new night spot. If we use it, we’ll be adding more distance to a bike route that already stands at 100 miles. But it could pay off with species such as Least Bittern, Swamp Sparrow, and King Rail that we’re not likely to get elsewhere.

Darkness is falling in camp, bringing to an end the constant shouting of Ovenbirds and starting off a new chorus of frogs. I check around the back of the ranger station to find an Eastern Phoebe tucked neatly onto a nest under the eaves. We found her here last year on a nest during Scout Week, and I wonder how many more of the same birds are around me doing the same things this year, just as we are.

(Thanks to Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods for sponsoring the Anti-Petrels; to Carl Zeiss Sports Optics for outfitting the Redheads (in part); and to the Woodbine Custard Ranch for providing wi-fi during an emergency. Photos are by France Dewaghe (Ovenbird) Hugh Powell (Green Heron) and Charles Eldermire (others).)

Student Birding: New Team Lineup Preps for World Series

Hugh — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:52:51 +0000

This week, some 62 teams are converging on Cape May, New Jersey, for the World Series of Birding, now in its 29th year. Starting at 12:00 a.m. Saturday morning, those birders will cup a hand to their ears and start counting birds. And they won’t stop until the following midnight.

Our own student team, the Redheads, will be among them, scouring Cape May County for somewhere close to 200 species. Each year as soon as they finish their final exams, the team scoots down to New Jersey to scout their World Series route. The results are impressive—they’ve won the Cape May County division four years in a row, with 163 species last year (on a slow migrant day) and a whopping 187 in 2009. Donations to the Redheads team go into a special fund for student research projects at the Cornell Lab.

Like all college teams, the Redheads lineup shifts as team members graduate and new faces appear. Last year, freshman Hope Batcheller was one of the new members of the team; this year she’s the team captain. Joining her are junior Jack Hruska and freshmen Ben Barkley, Eric Gulson, and Brendan Fogarty.

Though the team is young, they’re by no means inexperienced. This will be Hope’s fifth World Series in all. Ben has competed three times already, and last year headed the team that won the Big Stay category (birding all day from a single spot). Jack and Eric have extensive tropical experience having lived in Nicaragua and Mexico, respectively. And Brendan’s youth team last year came away with the third highest total of any team in the World Series, period.

The rest of us here at the Cornell Lab are thrilled to have so much young talent in our midst. When these students aren’t out birding, many of them work here on projects with our eBird, All About Birds, and Neotropical Birds websites, as well as on student research projects. When you donate to the Redheads, you help grow a fund that enables Cornell students to get out into the field and do research first hand. For example, we’ll have students working with Project Puffin in Maine, learning documentary film-making with our Multimedia department, and helping to study birds and army ants in Ecuador.

We do have one other team headed down to Cape May this week. Our birding-by-bicycle team, the Anti-Petrels, will defend their own title in the Carbon Footprint Challenge. They won the category in 2010 and 2011, each year riding 100 miles and tallying 150 and 144 species, respectively. You’ll hear more from the Redheads and the Anti-Petrels right here and on Facebook, as the scouting begins. Thanks for your support.

(Image: L to R: Brendan Fogarty, Hope Batcheller, Jack Hruska, Ben Barkley, Eric Gulson. Photo by Jessie Barry.)

Eleven Out of Twelve: a Tour of Australia’s Wet Tropics Endemics (Part 1)

Hugh — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:33:12 +0000

This is Part 1 of an account—for any of you who love tales of unusual birds in unusual places—of a recent trip to Australia’s Wet Tropics region near Cairns, Queensland. In this Part we will discuss: Macleay’s Honeyeater, Victoria’s Riflebird, Pied Monarch, Golden Bowerbird, Tooth-billed Bowerbird, and the abominable Fernwren.

Birders love endemics—species you can see in only one place in the entire world. They provide excellent incentive to travel and, once you see them, you carry their memories in your mind like stamps in a passport. And Australia is a fantastic place for endemics. I saw my first endemic early on my first morning—an Australian Brush-Turkey strutting along a footpath at the Cairns Botanic Gardens, its bright-red head as bare as a vulture’s.

When talking about Australian endemics, it helps to be specific. As a result of its geographic isolation, Australia is crawling with them. And not just kangaroos and koalas; Australia has some 330 bird species that occur noplace else. (The similarly sized continental U.S. holds only about 16 endemics.) I shook off the thrill of the brush-turkey and set my mind on the dozen endemic species that can be found within a half-day’s drive of Cairns.

I was visiting Australia’s Wet Tropics, a slender band of World Heritage Area rainforests surrounded by sugarcane and dairy farms, where 12 endemic birds live among some 350 other species. Scattered among the tiny towns and backroads are a handful of lodges that specialize in helping birders see the local specialties, and I was lucky enough to go birding there in late April with a couple of other journalists (Ed Williams of BirdLife Australia and Mike Weedon of UK’s Bird Watching magazine). The places range from modest homes nestled under rainforest canopies to posh ecoresorts with gourmet chefs, exquisite settings, and amenities fully capable of satisfying a group’s nonbirding members. After a week I had found 11 of the 12 endemics, and as I followed from one to the next, they led me to find a couple hundred of the region’s astounding bird species.

My first Wet Tropics endemic was a group of Macleay’s Honeyeaters. They were sipping nectar from a feeder and dodging attacks by a temperamental Helmeted Friarbird. This was on the back deck of Cassowary House, the home of Sue and Phil Gregory, just outside the town of Kuranda. To my eye, honeyeaters are a bit like the dazzlingly diverse tanagers of Central and South America. Though honeyeaters don’t reach the gaudy heights of, say, Paradise Tanagers, they’re more elegantly proportioned, with longer necks and gracefully curved bills. And like tanagers, some species that look unimpressive in the field guide take on a complex beauty when seen in real life. Macleay’s is like that—on paper, a scruffy mix of yellow streaks on a brownish green body. In life, the green acquires a shimmer and the yellow streaks seem sharply painted, floating over the background color.

The second endemic showed up the next morning as the gloom of dawn simmered out of the rainforest. We had gotten up early to watch musky rat-kangaroos—sharp-featured, reddish-brown creatures thought to be early ancestors of kangaroos. Through the dripping palms and vines came a large songbird with a finely streaked breast, buffy eyebrow, and a long, hefty, decurved bill. This was a gentle introduction to the most fantastical of all bird families, the birds-of-paradise—a female Victoria’s Riflebird. Two days later I saw a male, an absurd creature with a glossy black cape of feathers and flashes of electric blue in the throat, crown, and tail. The male’s feathers (but not the female’s) make a distinctive rustling in flight, like the sound of taffeta. A few times I saw a male perched on a high snag, puffing out its feathers and raising its rounded wings over its head one at a time—a young male practicing a courtship display.

One of the most famous rivers in Queensland’s Wet Tropics is the Daintree, where lowland rainforest remains and people take riverboat rides to see crocodiles, Black-necked Storks, and Great-billed Herons. Trish and Andrew Forsyth, who run Red Mill House, took me out birding here and found a Buff-breasted Paradise-Kingfisher still hanging around—most have left for winter in Papua New Guinea by the end of April. In a giant mixed flock of foraging birds we found at least three Pied Monarchs—my third endemic. Though they look superficially like flycatchers, they forage more like kinglets, constantly flicking, hopping, and clinging momentarily to the undersides of tree branches. As the name suggests, they’re black and white, but a rich white patch on the neck seems especially luminous and rich, almost like the bird is wearing a ruff.

West of Cairns, at about 2,000 feet elevation, lies a volcanic region called the Atherton Tablelands. It’s a mite cooler than the lowlands, and endemics lurk in the patches of misty rainforest that cling to peaks. A remarkable naturalist named Alan Gillanders showed us some of his favorite spots, including Mt. Hypipamee National Park, where my fourth endemic, the Golden Bowerbird, builds its monuments. The bowers are easier to find than the birds, and Gillanders led us right up to one. It wasn’t the immaculately curated, color-coordinated showpiece that you may have seen in magazines—those belong to other species. Golden Bowerbirds pile curved sticks into impressively untidy heaps about four feet high. The collection looks a bit like a gigantic one of those chocolate-covered chow mein spiders that kids make at Halloween. The twigs are in fact all stuck together by a curious, invisible fungus that grows through them shortly after the bird puts them in place. As for the bird itself, we heard it before we saw it. The song, as such, is one of the most unusual noises I’ve ever heard come out of a bird—a rhythmic rolling that sounds like a piece of machinery. The bird was perched low in the understory, a smear of lustrous yellow against the dim light.

(Later on, Jon Nott of Rose Gums Wilderness Retreat took us out to see a platypus sculling through a lily pond. Though not technically a regional endemic—or a bird—it was one of the highlights of the trip all the same.)

My fifth endemic was another bowerbird, but it was up to me to ferret it out alone. Our group had seen one a few days earlier, but it was that worst sort of sighting where three people are looking at a cluster of leaves that may or may not be shaking. In one moment, the head of a Tooth-billed Bowerbird pops out, looks at the assembled birders first with one eye and then the next, and then disappears. One person shouts, “Tooth-billed Bowerbird!”, the next shouts, “Tooth-billed Bowerbird!”, and the third is looking a little too far to the right. As annoying as it is at the time, this is usually for the best, because it forces you to go out and get a proper, satisfying look at the bird yourself. I got some advice on where to find one from a free birding app for the region, and that’s how I spent three hours walking around Wongabel State Forest.

I saw displaying riflebirds, an endemic scrubwren and an endemic robin (more about them in Part 2), and heard the amazing sci-fi sounds of duetting Eastern Whipbirds (listen) and the aggravated mewling of Spotted Catbirds (listen)—a big, green-backed, yellow-billed relative of the bird I was seeking. My problem was that Tooth-billed Bowerbirds spend April sitting quietly in the midstory. The best time to find them is during their breeding season, when they give out hoarse squawks and turn over leaves, pale side up, on the forest floor to use as a sort of courting stage.

Just as I was coming back out of the forest, I heard a quick rush of wings and somehow knew, by its very unobtrusiveness, that I’d found one. It turned out these birds really are the kind that look drab in life as well as in the field guide—a brown bird with heavy brown streaks and a thick, slightly hooked black bill. Still, there was something about this bird that struck me—maybe it was the just-in-time sighting, or its patient silence just off the trail, or the simple weirdness of this family, the heftiness of the bird, its unfamiliar proportions, its thick neck and short tail, that brought home what a strange place I had been walking around in for the past week.

And that’s it—you can stop reading the post at this point, because the sixth endemic in Part 1 is the one I didn’t get: the Fernwren. We thought we’d heard one about halfway through the week, but it turned out to be the rare-but-not-endemic Chestnut-breasted Cuckoo (more on that in Part 2). We listened for one at Mt. Hypipamee, as the thrill of the Golden Bowerbird was settling in, while German tourists strode up the path, out of sight, and back down again. Next I followed the app’s suggestions to a forest at nearby Lake Barrine National Park. There I saw many beautiful honeyeaters, more riflebirds than I could have imagined possible back on day 1, plus clouds of vireo-like “gerygones” twittering overhead, screeching cockatoos, bucketloads of brush-turkeys, and little Red-browed Finches making nests in tree ferns.

But no Fernwrens. I spent the last 45 minutes before I left the tablelands listening for these shy little ground birds beside a creek, as wait-a-while vines tore at my clothes, and some (probably endemic) species of chigger bored into my legs, and the region’s infamous heat-seeking leeches inched up my trousers. Of course, people always say you have to leave something to come back for. And I tried to repeat that to myself as I drove toward the airport.

In Part 2, I’ll recount an extraordinary day birding on Mt. Lewis near the town of Mareeba, where a quiet, patient guide named Del Richards helped us find the other six endemics in a single afternoon. I saw several of these species again, elsewhere in my travels, but Mt. Lewis was the first place I saw these six, and it stands out as an epic day of birding in a strange land.

(Images: Macleay’s Honeyeater by JJ Harrison; Victoria’s Riflebirds by Kelson; Pied Monarch and Fernwren by Tim Lenz; Golden Bowerbird by David Cook, all Creative Commons licensed or used with permission; Tooth-billed Bowerbird painting by Richard Bowdler Sharpe [public domain]. Look for more stories about science and conservation in northeastern Australia in upcoming issues of Living Bird magazine.)

Sapsuckers Overcome Mishaps, Misfortune to Tie Their Big Day Record [video]

Hugh — Tue, 01 May 2012 05:58:33 +0000

The concept of a Big Day is a bold one—a midnight-to-midnight sleepless birding blitz to see or hear as many species as humanly possible. Team Sapsucker—Chris Wood, Jessie Barry, Andrew Farnsworth, Marshall Iliff, and Tim Lenz—took on that challenge in Texas last year, setting the North American record at 264, and then they doubled-down for Big Day 2012, drawing up a never-before-tried-route that they hoped would net them even more birds.

Their run started in San Antonio in the wee hours of Friday, April 27. After a promising start, misfortune struck in the form of an old nail at a city dump, traffic in Houston, and a late-day shift in the sea breeze. By the time the clock struck midnight, the team had tied their own record of 264 species, getting their final bird with just four minutes to spare.

Big Day 2012 began at midnight with a Yellow-crowned Night Heron at Brackenridge City Park in San Antonio, then a sweep through the city that included a nesting American Robin beneath a streetlight. A flashlight scan yielded a swimming Least Grebe (as Barn and Great Horned owls called), and a bevy of ducks in the moonlight: Canvasbacks, Redheads, Wood Ducks, and Northern Pintails. Three of the team also heard an Elf Owl, but the other two missed it—crucially, as it turned out.

At daybreak, the Sapsuckers scooted west toward Uvalde, an area rich in Mexican birds. During scouting, Iliff had drawn up a plan to connect the dots between the birds, timed to when they began singing at dawn—a Tropical Kingbird at 6:20 a.m., a Green-tailed Towhee at 6:55 a.m., then a Ringed Kingfisher that regularly flew by the same spot at Chalk Bluff Park at 7:08 a.m. The Sapsuckers arrived at 7:04, but the kingfisher didn’t show. A precious half-hour ticked by. The team scooped up a Rufous-capped Warbler—one of very few records ever in the state—and an unexpected American Pipit, but still no Ringed Kingfisher. From there, the team rolled into the Uvalde Fish Hatchery, where the hatchery manager had granted the team special access to pick up Cinnamon Teal, Ring-necked Duck, and Yellow-rumped Warbler—three species the team didn’t see anywhere else during the day.

Next, the team made the fateful decision to go for a Chihuahuan Raven at the Uvalde city dump. They pursued one to the top of the landfill before a whishing sound grabbed their attention: a nail protruding from a rapidly deflating tire. And the spare tire storage mechanism wouldn’t release.

Time to call it quits and try again the following day? Not for team captain Chris Wood. “There are no ‘re-dos’ in Big Day,” he said. “A hockey team couldn’t get into the Stanley Cup playoffs, then decide they’re having a bad day and they want to try again tomorrow. Same thing with Big Day.”

The Sapsuckers pulled into Garza’s Radiator Shop in Uvalde and Wood, speaking Spanish, persuaded the repair man to do a quick fix. “Evidently, he likes birds,” Wood said. Farnsworth sprinted two miles to an ATM while Iliff, Barry, and Lenz huddled around their computer to recalibrate the route. Within 30 minutes the Sapsuckers were back on the road. They had to drop a few locations (and birds) from their route to make up time, but soon the team was in the Hill Country, where they nailed Black-capped Vireo, Golden-cheeked Warbler, and Varied Bunting in short order. Iliff called in a Greater Roadrunner, and by 11:08 the team was leaving the Hill Country for Houston—30 minutes behind schedule, but at roughly 150 birds for the day, a little ahead of where they had hoped to be on their Big Day list thus far.

On the four-hour drive to Houston, Farnsworth used his uncanny skill at long-distance spotting, picking out Cooper’s Hawk, Red-shouldered Hawk, White-tailed Hawk, and Franklin’s Gull from his seat in the back. When the team pulled over to verify the gull they found themselves standing atop a fire ant nest. A painful price, yet worth it, for a bonus bird that migrates at high altitudes and often flies right over Texas.

Near Houston, misfortune returned. Rice fields that were brimming with water, and waterfowl, just a day earlier were almost completely dried up. A flock of 25 Hudsonian Godwits was gone. A few shorebirds pecked around in the muck: Wilson’s Phalarope, Baird’s Sandpiper, and Buff-breasted Sandpiper. In a patch of piney woods in Houston, the Sapsuckers hit eastern species including Downy, Red-bellied, and Red-headed woodpeckers and Prothonotary and Pine warblers, but missed Great Crested Flycatcher. The misses were adding up.

So was the traffic in Houston. Still 30 minutes behind schedule, the Sapsuckers hit rush hour. Farnsworth used driving skills honed in Manhattan to weave through the gridlock and reach the route’s most critical point: the ferry to Port Bolivar. Miss that 4:30 connection, and their Big Day would be over. But the team arrived 15 minutes early—enough time for the authorities to conduct a full inspection of this suspicious-looking car filled with five people with binoculars. The team netted a Magnificent Frigatebird during the crossing, and the ferry arrived in port one minute early.

At Bolivar Flats, the team marched down the beach to rack up several gulls and terns, along with a Lesser Scaup, though they missed American White Pelican. In trees just off the beach, the team found a cluster of eastern migrants such as Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Indigo Bunting, and Baltimore Oriole. At High Island, a legendary spot for migratory songbirds, they scored 15 species in 75 minutes, including Cerulean, Magnolia, and Blackpoll warblers.

But then the sun went down, the winds picked up, and the birding came to a grinding halt. At Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge the team listened for marsh birds in the dark for three hours, adding only Seaside Sparrow, Yellow and King rails, and Common Gallinule. At 11:56 p.m., a Purple Gallinule called once, and that was it. The final bird for Friday, April 27.

Thirty seconds after midnight, several gallinules erupted into a chorus of laughter, and Team Sapsucker laughed right along with them. “It had been a tough day, and we all needed a good laugh,” Wood said.

Minutes later, Iliff tallied the day’s score in the dark, his face illuminated by the glow of his laptop screen. Jubilation at first—265 species, a new record!—then mellowed with the realization that the team had to subtract some birds due to the 95 percent rule. This rule states that 95 percent of the birds on a team’s list must be seen by everyone on the team. Upon double-checking the numbers, Iliff realized that that Elf Owl in San Antonio wasn’t unanimous. Off the list it came, and the day’s tally dropped to 264—a repeat of the record.

In tying the record—tallying 11 new species every hour of the day, or one new species every five and a half minutes, all day long—the Sapsuckers proved once again how remarkable a record of 264 species in 24 hours really is. More importantly, though, the generosity of all of our Big Day donors helped us raise needed funds for the Lab’s conservation work. Sponsorship by Carl Zeiss Sports Optics ensured that all donations go directly to conservation.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the Sapsuckers aren’t already thinking about getting just one more. As Farnsworth said, “We’ll definitely be coming back to Texas again next year.”

Though next time, they might avoid the dump.

Special Thank-You Video From Team Sapsucker

On the day after Big Day, the members of Team Sapsucker took a few minutes to say a big thank-you to all who donated or pledged in our biggest fundraiser of the year.

And for those of you keeping track at home, here’s Team Sapsucker’s Final Big Day 2012 List
(in taxonomic order)

Black-bellied Whistling-Duck
Fulvous Whistling-Duck
Wood Duck
Gadwall
American Wigeon
Mallard
Mottled Duck
Blue-winged Teal
Cinnamon Teal
Northern Shoveler
Northern Pintail
Canvasback
Redhead
Ring-necked Duck
Lesser Scaup
Red-breasted Merganser
Ruddy Duck
Northern Bobwhite
Wild Turkey
Pacific Loon
Common Loon
Least Grebe
Pied-billed Grebe
Brown Pelican
Neotropic Cormorant
Double-crested Cormorant
Anhinga
Magnificent Frigatebird
American Bittern
Great Blue Heron
Great Egret
Snowy Egret
Little Blue Heron
Tricolored Heron
Reddish Egret
Cattle Egret
Green Heron
Black-crowned Night-Heron
Yellow-crowned Night-Heron
White Ibis
White-faced Ibis
Roseate Spoonbill
Black Vulture
Turkey Vulture
Osprey
Swallow-tailed Kite
White-tailed Kite
Mississippi Kite
Northern Harrier
Cooper’s Hawk
Harris’s Hawk
Red-shouldered Hawk
Broad-winged Hawk
Swainson’s Hawk
White-tailed Hawk
Red-tailed Hawk
Crested Caracara
Peregrine Falcon
Yellow Rail
Clapper Rail
King Rail
Sora
Purple Gallinule
Common Gallinule
American Coot
Black-bellied Plover
Snowy Plover
Wilson’s Plover
Semipalmated Plover
Piping Plover
Killdeer
American Oystercatcher
Black-necked Stilt
American Avocet
Spotted Sandpiper
Solitary Sandpiper
Greater Yellowlegs
Willet
Lesser Yellowlegs
Upland Sandpiper
Whimbrel
Long-billed Curlew
Marbled Godwit
Ruddy Turnstone
Red Knot
Sanderling
Semipalmated Sandpiper
Least Sandpiper
White-rumped Sandpiper
Baird’s Sandpiper
Pectoral Sandpiper
Dunlin
Stilt Sandpiper
Buff-breasted Sandpiper
Short-billed Dowitcher
Long-billed Dowitcher
Wilson’s Phalarope
Laughing Gull
Franklin’s Gull
Ring-billed Gull
Herring Gull
Lesser Black-backed Gull
Least Tern
Gull-billed Tern
Caspian Tern
Black Tern
Common Tern
Forster’s Tern
Royal Tern
Sandwich Tern
Black Skimmer
Rock Pigeon
Eurasian Collared-Dove
White-winged Dove
Mourning Dove
Inca Dove
Common Ground-Dove
White-tipped Dove
Monk Parakeet
Yellow-billed Cuckoo
Greater Roadrunner
Barn Owl
Eastern Screech-Owl
Great Horned Owl
Elf Owl
Barred Owl
Lesser Nighthawk
Common Nighthawk
Common Pauraque
Common Poorwill
Chuck-will’s-widow
Chimney Swift
Ruby-throated Hummingbird
Black-chinned Hummingbird
Belted Kingfisher
Green Kingfisher
Red-headed Woodpecker
Golden-fronted Woodpecker
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Ladder-backed Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Eastern Wood-Pewee
Acadian Flycatcher
Black Phoebe
Eastern Phoebe
Vermilion Flycatcher
Ash-throated Flycatcher
Brown-crested Flycatcher
Great Kiskadee
Tropical Kingbird
Couch’s Kingbird
Western Kingbird
Eastern Kingbird
Scissor-tailed Flycatcher
Loggerhead Shrike
White-eyed Vireo
Bell’s Vireo
Black-capped Vireo
Yellow-throated Vireo
Hutton’s Vireo
Red-eyed Vireo
Blue Jay
Green Jay
Western Scrub-Jay
American Crow
Chihuahuan Raven
Common Raven
Horned Lark
Northern Rough-winged Swallow
Purple Martin
Bank Swallow
Barn Swallow
Cliff Swallow
Cave Swallow
Carolina Chickadee
Tufted Titmouse
Black-crested Titmouse
Verdin
Cactus Wren
Rock Wren
Canyon Wren
Carolina Wren
Bewick’s Wren
Sedge Wren
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
Black-tailed Gnatcatcher
Eastern Bluebird
Gray-cheeked Thrush
Swainson’s Thrush
Wood Thrush
American Robin
Gray Catbird
Northern Mockingbird
Long-billed Thrasher
Curve-billed Thrasher
European Starling
American Pipit
Cedar Waxwing
Tennessee Warbler
Orange-crowned Warbler
Nashville Warbler
Northern Parula
Tropical Parula
Yellow Warbler
Magnolia Warbler
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Golden-cheeked Warbler
Black-throated Green Warbler
Yellow-throated Warbler
Pine Warbler
Blackpoll Warbler
Cerulean Warbler
Black-and-white Warbler
American Redstart
Prothonotary Warbler
Ovenbird
Northern Waterthrush
Kentucky Warbler
Common Yellowthroat
Rufous-capped Warbler
Yellow-breasted Chat
Olive Sparrow
Green-tailed Towhee
Canyon Towhee
Cassin’s Sparrow
Rufous-crowned Sparrow
Chipping Sparrow
Clay-colored Sparrow
Field Sparrow
Lark Sparrow
Black-throated Sparrow
Lark Bunting
Savannah Sparrow
Grasshopper Sparrow
Le Conte’s Sparrow
Nelson’s Sparrow
Seaside Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
White-crowned Sparrow
Summer Tanager
Scarlet Tanager
Northern Cardinal
Pyrrhuloxia
Rose-breasted Grosbeak
Blue Grosbeak
Indigo Bunting
Varied Bunting
Painted Bunting
Dickcissel
Red-winged Blackbird
Eastern Meadowlark
Western Meadowlark
Yellow-headed Blackbird
Brewer’s Blackbird
Common Grackle
Boat-tailed Grackle
Great-tailed Grackle
Bronzed Cowbird
Brown-headed Cowbird
Orchard Oriole
Hooded Oriole
Bullock’s Oriole
Baltimore Oriole
House Finch
Lesser Goldfinch
House Sparrow

Did you miss our baby herons hatching? Watch them here! [video]

Hugh — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:13:25 +0000

The Great Blue Herons in the nest outside our office have been sitting on five eggs for the last month. Over the weekend, the first pips appeared in two eggs, soon followed by the wavering heads of two fuzzy chicks. Thousands of people watched live on our Great Blue Heron cam, and by this morning there were four chicks wobbling around between their parents’ gigantic feet. The fifth egg could hatch anytime.

In case you weren’t watching while all the drama unfolded, we’ve captured the action and posted highlights as a series of short YouTube videos. In the one above, you can see the moment that the first chick finally raises its head clear of the eggshell. Be sure to watch the rest of the videos in this playlist—you can see earlier shots of the chick struggling to pull its head free of its shell hat (with the father helping a bit) as well as later shots of nestlings two and three. As the birds dry off and get more mobile, it’s amazing to see how long their necks are already, and how fuzzy their feathers are.

With these high-definition and nighttime cams streaming 24/7, viewers are able to follow these herons live, often getting views that scientists rarely see.

“From the very first night, viewers witnessed little-known events, such as herons courting and mating by moonlight,” our director, John Fitzpatrick, said. “They’ve watched live as the herons defended their nest, uttering rarely heard, spine-chilling defensive screams as Great Horned Owls attacked in early morning hours. Even the professionals are gaining new insights from these live cams.”

The nest has survived several Great Horned Owl attacks, as well as a snowstorm that would have buried the nest in snow if not for the parent steadfastly sitting on the eggs. More than half a million people from 166 countries have tuned in so far. Stay tuned for more news, screenshots, and videos as the heron chicks grow. (And if you haven’t seen the hawk chicks over at our Red-tailed Hawk cam, you’ll want to check them out, too.)

Big Day Forecast—Fair South Winds, With a Good Chance of Birds

Annetta — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:20:24 +0000

Science editor Gustave Axelson is staying in contact with the Sapsuckers in Texas and providing daily Facebook updates on the team’s scouting preparations leading up to the Big Day. Here’s his latest:

The birds and the weather appear to be cooperating with the Sapsuckers, and everything looks like a go for a Friday Big Day attempt to break the single-day North American birding record of 264 species in 24 hours.

Sapsucker weather expert Andrew Farnsworth has been studying the forecasts, and he likes what he sees. After several days earlier in the week when northerly winds kept the migration bottled up, fair winds are now blowing out of the south, which could open the spigot for migrant birds flying out of the Yucatan Peninsula. Plus, Farnsworth sees the possibility of light easterly winds as well, which could push some birds that migrate through the Caribbean, such as Bobolinks, toward Texas.

“There’s nothing in the weather forecast that gives us a reason to go Saturday instead of Friday,” Farnsworth said. By doing Big Day on a week day, the Sapsuckers will avoid heavy road traffic headed to the beaches, as well as crowds at the ferry to the Bolivar Peninsula—a critical connection point in their Big Day route.

After six days of scouting, the Sapsuckers have a minute-by-minute plan for Big Day, right down to a Ringed Kingfisher that’s been flying by the same spot at Chalk Bluff every morning around 7:08 a.m. In the past couple days, the team has picked up more locations for birds that they missed in their Big Day last year, such as a Scaled Quail (“We always knew they were around, but we could never find it,” said Sapsucker Marshall Iliff) and a Tropical Kingbird (a species more common in Mexico that just expanded into Texas in the early 1990s). There are still a few birds MIA on the Sapsucker’s most wanted list, though, such as a Green Jay. Iliff says they have twice seen Green Jays flying by near Uvalde, but they have yet to find a reliable location for one. “At this point, we’re resolved to miss it, but you never know,” Iliff said.

Even so, the Sapsuckers have sourced more than 300 bird species during their scouting over the past week. “I’m trying to temper my optimism, but at this point I’d be very surprised if we don’t break the record, barring something like a missing the ferry,” Iliff said.

According to Farnsworth, the team’s new Texas Triangle strategy this year—San Antonio to the Hill Country, then to Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula instead of Corpus Christi—is worth the extra hour of drive time. “It’s definitely putting more birds into play,” said Farnsworth. “We’ve got a little section of the Piney Woods in our route this year, which gives us birds like Red-headed Woodpecker and Pine Warbler that weren’t on our radar screen last year.”

Farnsworth said a stop-off at Houston on the way from the Hill Country to Galveston is also a key addition to the route. “We’ve found good numbers of Hudsonion Godwits there. That’s a species we missed last year that I’m very optimistic about.”

The big question now is, will the godwits and the other migrant birds stay where the Sapsuckers scouted now that migration-friendly south winds are blowing again? How many of the 300 species scouted can the Sapsuckers re-find on Friday?

Today is a final day for the team to re-check the locations of birds, then rendezvous at their hotel in San Antonio tonight for a big dinner. The Sapsuckers will be in bed by 8 p.m. tonight, and then up at 11 to roll out. They’ll start Big Day at midnight on the River Walk, listening hard for their first target species—Barred Owl.

Cornell Lab Helps Artist Maya Lin Ask “What is Missing?” on Earth Day 2012

Annetta — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:23:12 +0000

The Cornell Lab submitted 14 conservation stories to Maya Lin's What is Missing? project, including one about the Golden-winged Warbler Conservation Action Plan.

Renowned artist Maya Lin—whose artwork and architecture over the past three decades has included the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. and the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama—has chosen Earth as the subject of her last memorial. And she chose the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to help tell the story.

Entitled What is Missing?, the artwork is a tribute to species and wild places both gone from our planet forever and currently being rescued from extinction. And it challenges the notion of a memorial as a singular static object, instead existing in multiple forms and multiple places. That multiplicity was on display on Earth Day 2012 at the Bloomberg Tower in New York City and on the Web.

At Bloomberg Tower last Friday, employees were transported from Manhattan into the world’s wildest places via What is Missing? multimedia exhibits. A massive video installation in the atrium featuring roaming polar bears of the Arctic and the watery wilderness of mangrove swamps in Florida. The elevators at Bloomberg Tower became mini-sound studios filled with the haunting calls of Commons Loons and reverberating songs of humpback whales. You can download a free digital release of the natural sounds used at the Bloomberg Tower Earth Day 2012 celebration from the Cornell Lab’s Macaulay Library.

On the Web, Lin debuted a new section of her What is Missing? website on Earth Day 2012 called Conservation in Action, which is a dot-based map of more than 400 conservation success stories from environmental groups around the world (including the Cornell Lab, which contributed 14 stories about species such as Golden-winged Warblers, northern right whales, Bermuda Petrels, and forest elephants). Conservation in Action joins the Global Map of Memory, which was launched on Earth Day 2011 as a map of more than 600 accounts of species or places diminished or lost forever.

On both maps, each click of a dot unlocks a new multimedia story—tales from the days when 5-foot-long lobsters were harvested in New York and sturgeon swam the Hudson River; haunting underwater ballads of humpback whales, along with the cacophony of manmade noises that disrupt ocean ecosystems; video of dancing prairie-chickens, a species not yet extinct but threatened by development; an audio slideshow depicting the annual loss of tropical rainforests equal in size to the United Kingdom.

“Maya Lin is an extraordinarily gifted, multidimensional artist. She sees and embraces connections between people and nature everywhere, and expresses these beautifully in sculpture, architecture, and now multimedia,” said Cornell Lab executive director John Fitzpatrick. “The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is proud to be collaborating with Maya’s haunting and ambitious What Is Missing? memorial, helping to raise global awareness about the need to protect threatened species and habitats all around the world. Archived sound and video recordings from our Macaulay Library and the expertise of our scientists achieve an important new voice through Maya’s elegant blending of vision, passion for the Earth, and attention to scientific detail.”

Lin hopes her What is Missing? project is a wake-up call to what’s being lost on Earth, and also a call-to-action that everybody can play a role in conservation.

“Some people said that a memorial to our living planet was depressing, but I believe that using memories and history to show the abundance of biodiversity the planet once held can spur people to realize their power to connect with work that is under way and take steps in their everyday lives, no matter how small,” she said.

Some of those everyday steps are on display at Conservation in Action, which spotlights how people can make a difference in in global conservation by what they buy, eat, and drink. Check it out at www.whatismissing.net.