There are a lot of opportunities to benefit the birds in your neighborhood. Here are some basic principles, focusing on habitat, bird feeders, and bird houses and nesting. I focus on the Pacific Northwest, but this can be generally applied elsewhere.
Habitat
Chestnut-backed Chickadee on eggs in a nest box in my yard.
Plant native trees! Chickadee parents need 6,000 moth caterpillars to raise a nest of chicks. They only get them from native trees – mostly alders, willows, birch, and bitter cherry. All this said, most non-native plants at least offer cover (e.g. Himalayan blackberries) and some offer berries that birds like (e.g. cotoneaster, mountain ash). Birds Connect Seattle offers some great guidance regarding planting for birds.
Be careful mowing, weeding, and doing yardwork April thru July. There may be towhees, juncos, and Song Sparrows nesting on the ground. I nearly decapitated baby towhees once. They were in a little clump of grass I let grow because my push mower couldn’t get there. Then one day I got out the weed whacker. I hear similar stories from people every year. They were pruning, mowing, clearing brush, moving a wood pile (with a wren nest) etc. and came upon an active nest.
A Spotted Towhee nest in a section of the yard I decided to just let go. They later nested in some weeds next to a garden box.
Better yet, leave some unkempt corners of your yard. The birds will use it. Some species even like being near human traffic – it protects them from other predators. Just don’t become an accidental predator! Usually the birds will let you know you are too close by constant calling.
Bird Feeding
Bird feeding is a great way to connect with birds and get to know them. I feed birds, especially in winter. But there are some do’s and don’ts.
First, try to avoid feeding House Sparrows, European Starlings, Brown-headed Cowbirds, and large numbers of corvids (e.g. jays and crows). The first two are invasive and introduced, and are widely known to displace native cavity-nesting birds, such as chickadees, wrens, nuthatches, and swallows. Cowbirds are native to the Great Plains, but invasive in the PNW. Their numbers are artificially augmented by human habitat destruction. They are known to displace a wide variety of native birds.
Finally, those colorful jays and clever crows are fierce nest predators, especially of cup nesters, such as robins, goldfinches, warblers, flycatchers, vireos, tanagers, and grosbeaks. Studies show that, where jays and crows are fed – and they are especially attracted to peanuts – other cup-nesting birds struggle to reproduce. In one study, the neighborhood robins suffered 99% nest failure where corvids were fed. I have a post focused on this: The maddening truth: Feeding crows and jays harms other birds. PLEASE DO NOT OFFER PEANUTS.
To avoid these undesirable outcomes, I never use peanuts and I only put out seed in winter – September thru March, when the junco horde and Golden-crowned Sparrows are here. I also avoid suet with peanuts. In summer, I restrict my bird feeding to just the hummingbird feeders and maybe some suet (though that can attract starlings).
The highlight of my yard birding, however, is not the feeders — it’s my little fountain and pond. It runs year-round and attracts all the feeder birds, plus migrating insectivores: kinglets, warblers, vireos, tanagers, and thrushes. I created a post on how to create a great water feature for less than $100: My backyard fountain and the birds that come to it.
A MacGillivray’s Warbler and an Orange-crowned Warbler at my little fountain pond.
Bird feeding concentrates birds, especially in winter. This can spread avian diseases. Common indicators of disease in the PNW are a House Finch with a growth around its eye or a siskin you can walk up to and pick up. If you see these things, take down your feeders immediately and wait at least two weeks.
Another potential concern with bird feeding is window strikes. The most important thing is feeder location. If goldfinches are hitting your window, the feeder is too close. Much has been written about how to address this problem, so I won’t go into it here. Hawk decals and plastic owls don’t work. The little dots apparently do. Here’s what I did when I had this problem at my previous home – mylar ribbons.
Bird houses
In the PNW, bird houses will be used by the cavity-nesting birds I mentioned above: chickadees, wrens, nuthatches, and swallows. Again, there are some do’s and don’ts.
Photo from the Olympic Peninsula Audubon Society. The hole can be an oval, a diamond, or some other shape – just never more than 7/8″ tall. The extra wood for the hole cover prevents birds from enlarging the hole.
First, nest hole size and design is critical. Way too many backyard bird houses inadvertently raise House Sparrows, causing more harm than good to the local bird community. That’s because the entrance holes are too big. A hole more than 1 1/8″ in diameter is too big. These House Sparrows then go on to kill the eggs, babies, and even adults of native birds. PLEASE DO NOT RAISE HOUSE SPARROWS. Monitor the box and remove House Sparrow nests if you see them forming (theirs are real messy, with dry straw sticking every which way).
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife offers this helpful diagram. This will exclude House Sparrows.
It is highly recommended to put nest boxes in shade, especially afternoon shade, to protect it from heat. Heat waves kill chicks. For swallows, they like open areas, so sometimes shade is not available. In that case, you can put heat shields on the boxes. See Mel Hafting’s post here about that (scroll down below the Purple Martin section).
One of my five boxes. I take down my boxes and clean them out each fall, and then put them back up. If they weren’t used, I move the location a bit. Birds will begin scouting for nesting sites as early as March.I made this box after seeing boxes for Lucy’s Warblers in Arizona. I thought wrens might use it. Sure enough, Bewick’s Wrens love it. The first year, the gaps where they enter were too big, and they were parasitized by a cowbird. (The female cowbird kept an eye on the nest for weeks!) This year I made the entrances smaller, and the wrens fledged four chicks.This box (not mine) has not been maintained. They put up a hole reducer, presumably to discourage House Sparrows, but woodpeckers have created a new hole on the side of the box. House Sparrows nested there this year. This intergrade Yellow-shafted x Red-shafted Northern Flicker spent two winters coming to my suet.
If you have questions, put them in the comments below and I’ll answer.
This was the expression hurled at many of us on a local birding listserv. The ironic thing is, we didn’t start the conversation. We simply intervened.
The original topic was bird names – the proposal to change the names of birds named after people. The reactions by many of the anti-change proponents have created a toxic environment, exemplifying why changes are needed in the birding world. I’ve written earlier how birding can save the world, but we need a whole lot more people connected and involved.
The listserv was Washington state’s Tweeters, a kind of generic statewide space for birders that has been around for decades. I’m not going to name names or go into great detail about who wrote what; you can look it up if you want. I’ll just use generic monikers from hereon.
This was not the first animated discussion on this topic at the Listserv. That happened back in the fall of 2023, when the AOS announced they would initiate a process to change all eponymous bird names. (For more on the details of that – and my posts on that topic – see below.) In November 2023, the Moderator eventually intervened with a clear statement, calling “a halt to this topic.”
That was the right call. Even if some don’t realize how offensive their statements are – and I’m being generous here – intentions don’t matter as much as impacts. The online comments were alienating to many new birders, young birders, and people of color. The Listserv was not a good forum for discussion.
But, over time, despite the ban, a steady trickle of anti-change emails occasionally appeared on the Listserv. In June 2024, several anti-change proponents began feeding off one another, supporting each other’s gripes and including bits of misinformation and inflammatory questions which had already been addressed in many public forums. One of them asked how they could get involved in the anti-change efforts.
This question, posted on the public Listserv rather than in a private backchannel, implied they could use this public space to plan their anti-change campaign, essentially asserting that the Listserv was their club house.
But it was not a private echo-chamber. Everybody could see what they wrote, and they surely knew that. Seeing no intervention by the Moderator, I stepped in, reminding them that this topic was out of bounds and explaining how what they were doing was “gate keeping” – a pubic action that was intended to preserve the status quo and drive certain others away.
I quickly received dozens of mostly private emails thanking me for stepping in.
At the Listserv, a dam kind of broke loose and, using a sports referee term, the game was out of control. As the flame war raged, one person used the racist-tainted trope, “Shut up and bird” – a phrase that openly declares that the Listserv is a safe space for white rage, where non-compliant others can be disregarded or put in their place. This person received no condemnation by the Moderator (at least not a public one). In the end, the only person sanctioned was one of the people against whom that taunt was leveled.
The whole episode, which has been repeated in various ways across dozens of other social forums in the past year, sent a message to new birders, younger birders, and birders of color: You are welcome as long as you keep your mouth shut and act like everyone else – everyone else being the older white birders who, historically, made up over 90% of the birding community. This is “whitewashed diversity” – you are welcome at the table if you don’t upset the status quo.
In the so-called culture wars regarding race – which have existed in this land since Bartolomé de Las Casas took on Christoper Columbus, Eastern whites rallied against Indian genocide, and abolitionists fought slavery – white liberals (WLs) have welcomed people of color at the table while conservatives have not wanted them anywhere near the house. But that welcome has not always been comprehensive – many WLs supported ethnic cleansing and the creation of Indian “reservations” because it was better than genocide; and some abolitionists, including Abraham Lincoln, favored shipping Blacks back to Africa.
Birders are mostly WLs. But let’s look at what is happening at the birding table today. Imagine a literal table, a sumptuous banquet laid out, with gallant lords and ladies at the feast. Their wealth, of course, was obtained over generations through the ethnic cleansing and enslavement of the Others. But now, generations later, they welcome the Others at the table. They call it diversity.
Now imagine the Others consider themselves equals at the table. They begin to voice their opinions, suggesting changes to the menu, the décor, and etiquette of the feast. Here the WLs bristle:
“What benefit would that make?”
“I don’t think more people will come if we make these changes.”
“Oh my god, what will they want to change next?”
“These changes will do nothing.”
“Where is the cost/benefit analysis of this?”
As the discussion heats up, the WLs have one final retort: “These requests have only created division.” As if the Others started the conflict.
If you look closer, it often turns out that the most outspoken voices against the Others are the chef, who is widely renown, the interior decorator, who everyone knows, and the master of ceremonies, who has held their position for forty-two years. (At the Listserv described above, the Moderator had close connections to such people.) They make the rules and exert their outsized influence on any potential implementation or rejection of proposed changes. They also control the conversation, make the rules about who talks when, and intervene when necessary. Or not.
Diversity is only real when voices are heard and respected, and where power is shared. Otherwise, the Others are just tokens of whitewashed diversity. It is no wonder they are bailing established Listservs, Audubon societies, and other historical structures for their own social forums and affinity groups.
We’ll still bird. And we’re building our own tables.
Entitled The Birds That Audubon Missed, Kenn Kaufman‘s new book is about much more than just those birds and John James Audubon. What Song of the Dodo was to ecology, this book is to American ornithology – an often fascinating and rollicking tale about the stumbles and successes of early ornithological pioneers. Kaufman was gracious enough to send me an advanced copy; the book comes out in two weeks and can be pre-ordered here. For me, it inspired these reflections.
Though included in Audubon’s book, there are still no records of Great-crested Grebe in North America.
Traveling without binoculars, early ornithologists relied on shotguns and specimens to distinguish new species. They focused on things like toe palmations – an early name for the Willet was Semipalmated Snipe. They got a lot wrong. Out of shotgun range in the middle of lakes, Western and Clark’s Grebes were widely considered to be Great-crested Grebes, a European species, for nearly half a century. Sexually dimorphic and highly migratory, the Red Knot was divided into eight different species across Europe and America. Meanwhile, birds that looked alike – small plovers, Catharus thrushes, Empidonax flycatchers – were often lumped.
Small-headed Flycatcher — Some of the birds described by Audubon are a puzzle to figure out, if they ever existed at all. He may have made this one up.
A huge caveat, of course – and Kaufman makes this clear – is that we’re talking about white European colonizers here. Because much of their work coincided with ethnic cleansing, the early settlers also lacked meaningful exchange of knowledge with their Native counterparts. Without both binoculars and shotguns, early Indigenous knowledge-keepers had one advantage – they focused on bird songs and calls, naming most species using onomatopoeias. It would be decades, if not a century, before European ornithologists began listening to birds as keys to their identity. It was only then that those thrushes and flycatchers were separated. Traill’s Flycatcher was only split into Alder and Willow Flycatchers during my lifetime.
The result is that modern ornithology stands on the shoulders of giants who had very wobbly knees, stumbling around the continent like brazen men, refusing to ask directions.
Many local chapters are changed “Audubon Society” to “Bird Alliance.”
No one was more wobbly and brazen than Audubon, desperately trying to make a living publishing his art and describing new species. In the end, about half the species he described had already been previously described by other European scientists, not to mention Native peoples. Today many of these birds are represented by eponymous bird names with descriptive scientific names (e,g., Euphagus cyanocephalus became Brewer’s Blackbird, and Peucaea aestivalisbecame Bachman’s Sparrow), because the scientific names strictly adhere to the first name they were given. The English names were more flexible.
Kaufman, ever gracious, puts a positive spin on all this, focusing on how recent our knowledge is, and how much there is still to learn about the birds we all love.
The son of a Haitian slave plantation owner, Audubon did not seem predisposed to seek out local Indigenous knowledge. Somehow he ignored the iconic ethereal song of the Swainson’s Thrush.
Before I get into this, here is a little bit about me. My pronouns are he/him. I am a citizen of Cherokee Nation and white-presenting (that is, I look like a white male).
1. Everyone likes birds.
Everyone. Regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, race, socio-economic status, political orientation, urban or rural background, if you asked them if they like birds, they’ll say yes. They may complain about a few problem birds that crap on their car, but in general, people will say they like birds. And they put their money into it. The public spends about as much on backyard bird feeding as it does on movies and television. Birds are beautiful. They fly. They evoke freedom and encourage us to dream.
2. Birding is a pathway to greater environmental knowledge and belief in science.
To get to know birds is to learn about migration, seasons, weather, ecology, habitats and threats to habitats. To watch birds is to see the human/nature interface in bright daylight – the dog that chases the endangered Snowy Plover, the development that removes the woods on the edge of town, the cat that kills the sparrows that migrated here from central Alaska. Birders overcome Nature Deficit Disorder. They become ecologically educated, understanding environmental issues.
3. Birders support environmental causes and the fight against climate change.
In general, birders are environmentalists. Cooper et al (2015) found that birders (and hunters) were “4 to 5 times more likely to engage in conservation behaviors,” such as supporting environmental causes. They concluded, “Strategies that include programs to encourage both hunting and birdwatching are likely to bring about long-term gains for conservation.”
4. There are far fewer birders than there should be.
There could be a lot more, but certain demographics are underrepresented in the birding community. This includes non-white ethno-racial groups, younger people, and less educated people.
Ethno-racial categories
In their 2021 paper, Racial, ethnic, and social patterns in the recreation specialization of birdwatchers: An analysis of United States eBird registrants, Jonathan Rutter et al (no relation to Jordan Rutter of Bird Names for Birds) analyzed a survey of 30,000 eBird users. That paper, especially Table 3, is the basis for the graphs presented here. Note that the eBird data comes from 2016-17 and the US population data comes from 2011-15. There has almost certainly been an increase in diversity in both datasets since then, especially the eBird data. In 2016, eBird was still fairly limited to certain social circles. The number of eBird users has nearly doubled since then. A new survey would show far more diversity.
Going back further, in 2005, John Robinson found that, while the majority of Blacks expressed a high level of interest in the environment, very few participated in birding (or other outdoor activities) and very few had ties to environmental organizations. He famously said that “the average bird watcher will meet no more than two or three African-American bird watchers over a 20-year period.” That has changed.
This underrepresentation has been correlated with other outdoor activities, as well as membership in conservation organizations – and especially in leadership – more on that below.
With respect to birders, are we talking about backyard feeder watchers or avid listers? Rutter et al dived into this, what is termed the degree of “specialization” – how avid and dedicated one is. They asked questions such as: How often to you travel from home to look for birds? How often do you use eBird? Do you own a scope? How many species can you identify by ear? They found no effect on specialization by race. In fact, race, age, gender, knowing a close friend or relative who is a birder, income, and education combined only “explained 6.7% of the variability in how central birdwatching was to respondents’ lives.” No matter what your background, once you start, you are equally likely to head down various paths of birding obsessiveness.
The huge racial divide then, occurs at step one, the decision to start looking at birds. After that, the birds do the rest. Rutter et al concluded, “Future efforts to diversify the birdwatching community, therefore, may be most effective if focused on increasing initial participation rates of underrepresented groups.”
Gender
Nearly every study shows there are slightly more female than male birders. This holds across all ethno-racial categories. (Note, this data, collected in 2016-17, makes no reference to non-binary or refuse-to-state responses. The total in the graph sums to 99.9%. I don’t know if this is rounding error or reflects alternative responses, or if alternative responses were removed from the analysis.)
Regarding degree of specialization – how avid and dedicated and experienced they were – men scored higher than women on these questions, but only by a small margin, just 1.7 points on a scale with a median score of 17 (e.g. perhaps men averaged 17.7 and women 16.0).
While there are lots of women birders, and they are nearly as specialized as men, they are far less likely to be in leadership. Most prominent birders – the ones who lead Christmas Bird Counts, serve as eBird reviewers, serve on state or national bird records committees, work as bird guides, speak at conferences, write field guides, etc. – are white men. (A notable historical exception: the first field guide that popularized birding for the public was written by Florence Merriam Bailey in 1889.)
Looking at the top 10 or 20 birders on eBird – in any state or region for any given year – women are typically only represented by a few individuals, whether looking at number of checklists submitted or – a decidedly more competitive and obsessive measure – number of species seen in a given year.
The dearth of women in leadership continues across environmental organizations in general. In 2015, Dorceta Taylor looked at 324 such groups, finding that “though females exceed males on the staff of environmental organizations, women are underrepresented in the top leadership echelons of the institutions.”
In academia, however, change is afoot. While ornithology professors are still mostly men, this varies across universities. The new generation is far more diverse. At the 2023 AOS annual convention, women won 19 of the 23 awards. Additionally, diversity, equity, and inclusion topics were prominent among the papers and presentations.
Age
For all ethno-racial categories, birders (in green) average older than the overall population (in blue), with the breakpoint generally in the upper 40s. Again, this data is dated, and more young birders now avidly embrace eBird. White birders skew older more than any others, and have, in proportion to their population, the fewest young birders and the most older birders. Asians are at the other end of the spectrum, with the most young birders as a proportion of their population. Asian young people are more than twice as likely to take up birding than their white counterparts. Latinx, Blacks, and Native Americans are between, in that order, with the Latinx closer to the Asian graph below.
The take home here is that there are many potential birders among those under 45 – and even more under 35 and yet more under 25. And young people of color are more likely to take up birding than white young people.
Education
Relative to the overall population, birders are extremely educated. One big caveat here: It could be that there are plenty of less-educated birders, but they just don’t use eBird as much. The survey showed that nearly half (48%) of the 30,000 eBird users surveyed had advanced degrees, compared to just 12% of the other whites (age 18+). This is even more true among birders of color. Latinx birders were 10x more likely than other Latinx to have advanced degrees. Blacks and Native Americans were 6x more likely. A person with an advanced degree is 13x more likely to be a birder than a person without a Bachelors.
The October 2021 issue of Birding magazine explored the least birded counties in the nation, based on the number of eBird checklists. Of the bottom 20, 18 were in Kentucky, Mississippi, or West Virginia, all small rural counties. Sure, they have fewer people than a major metropolitan county. King County (Seattle) generates many times more eBird checklists in a single day (about 700/day) than these counties have in the history of eBird (all with fewer than 100 checklists total). At the same time, I wonder if these low rural county birding rates are partly explained by the education graph above.
Hunting is popular in these areas. 60% of duck hunters are from small towns or rural areas. Surveys of duck hunters show some similarity to birders (e.g. predominantly white), but a different trend regarding education. While they still skew slightly toward more educated, their graph mimics the general population fairly closely.
As someone who learned to bird from my father’s duck hunting blind in a small rural county, I can also assure you that plenty of lesser educated hunters and anglers love the outdoors and know birds pretty well. An advanced degree is not required for bird identification, and certainly not to be an avid birder. Lesser educated rural people could become birders. The take home here is that there are millions of potential birders among those who are less educated, and certainly among hunters who support environmental causes.
Income
Despite their exceptionally higher education level, birders do not earn more money than the general public. This is pretty consistent across all ethno-racial categories. If anything, birders earn slightly less. For example, 24% of the general public earns between $100K and $200K per year. Only 21% of birders do.
To summarize where we are, there are three main demographic groups (which no doubt have some overlap with each other) that bird at lower rates: people of color, younger people (especially whites), and less educated people. While there have no doubt been significant increases in these groups since this survey was done, it is still clear that there is a lack of birders of color and women in leadership roles. This is where there are opportunities to grow birding and the environmental movement in general. And research suggests that knowing other birders is key to start birding.
5. Because underrepresented people are not included – and are actively excluded.
In recent years, there has been a rise in historically-marginalized identity-based birding clubs and ornithological organizations, a kind of alternative birding universe where people can experience birding in a closer-knit community with different social rules, expectations, and styles of communication than in larger white-male-dominated birding circles. Here are some of those groups (and a podcast):
In Color Birding Club – we strive to make the birding experience a positive one for BIPOC folks and their allies.
Anti-Racist Avid Birders – dedicated to making the outdoors—and birding in particular— accessible and safe for people who find themselves under-represented or unacknowledged in traditional birding communities.
Always Be Birdin’ podcast – aims to change the narrative of birding. How we bird, where we bird and who is birding. Join me as I go out into the field with BIPOC birding experts, novice baby birders like myself and nature enthusiasts.
Frontiers in Ornithology – to educate and inspire youth to take their passion for birds to a higher level.
(Please let me know of more groups I should add to this list.)
There are also many local groups like the ones above, as well as for young birders. And there is Black Birders Week, supported by a wide range of organizations.
Here are some important essays and books on the same themes:
Birding is a pseudo-academic hobby that can take on the vibe of a competitive academic department with a strict, though unwritten, code of behavior. As with any hobby, there is a whole lingo associated with certain activities, especially chasing and listing. Some of it sends subtle messages about how to be a birder, and what it takes to be an Alpha dog.
I drank the Kool-Aid for years. I thought these things were important to cultivate the right kind of birders. I was a gate-keeper. Now I realize enforcing a specific culture and birding etiquette can be a turnoff to new birders, especially those from different demographic backgrounds not comfortable navigating in white male spaces, much less a very specialized and potentially competitive environment. We are, after all, talking about enjoying nature here.
Let’s take one example. Among the cardinal sins for those seeking birding Alpha status is this: do not make an identification mistake in public. When I was a young birder, I loved public debates and discussions about golden-plovers and dowitchers, vireos and accipiters; that’s how I learned. They seem harder to find now – not the birds, the open discussions.
I was recently called “incredibly brave” by a teenage birder for publicly calling attention to a difficult id problem between a rare vagrant and a common species, positing that the bird may be the vagrant. The teen had already figured out the code. The bird, as the odds have it, turned out to be the common one. Later, people were thanking me for initiating the educational discussion online. I’m not brave, just jaded enough that I’m trying to care less about my reputation and am trying to model ‘learning in public,’ which is critical to learning about birds. If gulls and Empidonax flycatchers teach us anything, it’s that everyone must be allowed to make mistakes.
The concept of “slow birding” recently evolved as an even more radical counter to the competitive and obsessive aspects of birding. Slow birding is about bird/life balance, where birding can be an act of mindfulness. The key point is this: There is no one right way to enjoy birds.
Institutional structures
Across academia and many workplaces, we have seen increased diversity over the past four decades. The US Congress has gone from 3% women in 1980 to 28% today. The same probably could not be said for bird record committees, birding tour guides or birding conference speakers.
One way the birding community creates obstacles to diversity is thru various institutional structures and processes. Sometimes it’s just the name. Outside the affinity-based birding clubs described above, most local clubs are “Audubon societies.” In addition to stereotypes of older white people peering thru trees at warblers, both the words “Audubon” and “society” are turnoffs to youth and people of color. It’s a shame because many local groups do great outreach and local conservation. They can be key points of entry for new birders.
I know many who used to work for National Audubon who now boycott them on principle. Some organizational clarification: National Audubon and various state affiliates (e.g. Audubon California, etc.) are all part of a single 501c3. That is the entity that has refused to change its name. Local Audubon societies, however, are separate 501c3’s; they can change their name any time they want. Seattle, Golden Gate, and many others have done so. The challenge now – and what has caused so much delay – is how to do so in a coordinated way, now that National is failing to provide a model for change.
Sometimes the barriers to entry are more substantial than the name; sometimes it’s the actual bylaws. The most dramatic example involves the North American Checklist Committee (NACC) of the American Ornithologists Society. They oversee lumps and splits (and, until recently, English bird names as well as scientific names). The members have advanced degrees in ornithology and are expert taxonomists. That’s no surprise. What is astonishing is that the members of this committee serve unlimited terms and new members are chosen by pre-existing members. Thus, turnover is slower than the US Supreme Court. Some of the members have been on the committee for over 30 years. Five of the eight members who were on the NACC in the year 2000 are still on today. (It has 11 members today, plus two Latina members from Mexico and Central America.) Only one of the nine Supreme Court justices today was there in 2000. The aim, of course, is doctrinal stability, but it comes at a cost. Such policies limit opportunities for younger academics to even aspire to the committee, and certainly retard diversity on the committee.
In the birding world, many state record committees, which oversee state records and evaluate observations of rarities (declaring what is “countable” for listers), have only slightly less-restrictive policies, often resulting in a revolving door of white males. For many of these committees, vacancies are filled only through the nomination by and approval of the existing committee members, just like the NACC. Given that these committees have only a dozen members at most, and there are hundreds of expert birders in most regions, it seems hard to believe there are not women and people of color qualified to serve. Some committee members I’ve spoken to say they try to reach out to other demographics to nominate them, but their efforts have not succeeded.
I’m not questioning the qualifications or bird decisions of these committees. Their service is commendable. Regardless, the appearance is of an entrenched aristocracy that appears to exclude women and people of color.
Even Christmas Bird Counts (CBCs), usually terrific opportunities for outreach, are not immune to institutional barriers to entry. There are some CBCs that are run as private clubs, closed to outsiders and beginners. On others, beginners are shunted off to less exciting routes.
Public gate-keeping
While there are plenty of legitimate questions and alternative perspectives for any issue in birding, recent discussions about birding and diversity issues (e.g. regarding committee membership and the re-naming of certain birds) have often crossed a line, being particularly insensitive to women, younger birders, and birders of color.
Recently, a friend of mine, a younger person of color and a beginning birder, joined a local former-Audubon bird club field trip for the first time. As the group began to gather – all older white men and women – the leader initiated a group gripe session about the proposed bird name changes.
I don’t know exactly what words were said, what arguments were made. Just the big picture – that an initiative, motivated by diversity and inclusion concerns, is being most criticized by white men over 65, the exact demographic that is most included and overrepresented in leadership positions – is not a good look.
(I acknowledge there are many prominent white male birders who are supportive of the bird names proposal: Kenn Kaufmann, David Sibley, Nate Swick.)
Apparently it is too much to hope that birding’s enormous diversity problem would somehow frame the overall conversation. Instead, some of the common arguments are premised as if the only people in the room are white, using entire frames of reference that exclude marginalized people from the conversation. In a public forum, these arguments essentially declare birding as white space.
Three examples that my friend may have heard:
1) When society’s morals change, the present morals should not be applied to people of the past. ~ This is a white issue. By “society,” they mean white society. Blacks have always opposed slavery, Natives have always opposed ethnic cleansing. We can debate how much white society has changed. What has most obviously changed is that now there are other voices at the table. These voices have grown up with different narratives about history and about how their families were impacted.
2) This is “wokeness” and “virtue-signaling.” ~ These are accusations by whites of whites. One doesn’t say a Black person is virtue signaling when they talk about police brutality. And one doesn’t call a Native woke when they talk about tribal sovereignty. No, woke and virtue-signaling are modern variations on “n-lover” and “squ*w men.” The use of these terms presupposes that the new initiatives are coming from white liberals. In fact, there are lots of people of color involved.
3) Competency and quality (for example, as a committee member) should always come before diversity. ~ This is insulting to women and people of color. It echos claims that underqualified people are given positions as charity, as “diversity hires.” Women and people of color have their own narrative – that they work twice as hard to get half as far. That they are, in short, often over-qualified. Diversity strengthens organizations so they don’t make the kinds of mistakes we are witnessing today, and also serve as inspirations to attract new people from across the demographic spectrum.
Another version of this is to point out how accomplished and important the angry white men are – that the bear has been poked too much, and thus the pace of change should slow down. Such arguments are both circular and ironic. The whole point is that there should not even be a bear. And if the bear is so angry about a symbolic measure, what about more concrete measures? We should all be on the same team, building a better world for birds and birders.
My friend didn’t go into detail about what arguments he heard at that bird walk. All he told me was that he won’t be going back.
6. Making birding more inclusive requires structural change and specific actions.
If the online debates don’t offer concrete solutions to make birding more inclusive, all those affinity-based groups I listed above do. Those birders are already acting! Some of the books I highlighted above are filled with ideas. I’m going to do a separate blog post later on creative ideas to increase diversity in birding. In the meantime, here are a few:
Increase diversity in leadership positions. Both Robinson (2005) and Rutter et al (2021) found that a lack of role models is a significant barrier to entry. Robinson compares Black participation in birding to golf, noting that, after the rise of Tiger Woods, the number of Black golfers nearly doubled in four years.
Change the bylaws of committees to allow for greater turnover (thru meaningful term limits). Use external nominations and external appointments or voting to fill vacancies.
Local clubs should offer a range of birding opportunities, targeting different demographics (e.g. youth, women, underrepresented ethno-racial groups). In Robinson’s survey, one respondent said that “a change in advertising and possible programs scheduled in the right areas, along with support from Blacks who back this effort, can change everything.”
Along with trips to Ecuador, promote 1MR and 5MR birding (birding within a 1 or 5 mile radius of your home), which increases bird/life balance, knowledge of local birding patches and environmental issues, local community, and birdability for those unable to travel long distances. It’s also a great way to find rare vagrants, especially at feeders in winter. In a similar vein, promote county birding and environmental big days and big years (walking and/or biking).
Outreach to hunters, who have a lot of commonalities with birders. We can be allies.
Finally, if you comment on this blogpost, don’t just say why something won’t work; focus on solutions. Positive suggestions for edits are also welcome. We’re all on the same team, birds are for everyone, and they need more allies.
Dark morph Broad-winged Hawk, Port Townsend, WA. May 19, 2021.
Robinson, J.C., 2005. Relative prevalence of African Americans among bird watchers. In In: Ralph, C. John; Rich, Terrell D., editors 2005. Bird Conservation Implementation and Integration in the Americas: Proceedings of the Third International Partners in Flight Conference. 2002 March 20-24; Asilomar, California, Volume 2 Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-191. Albany, CA: US Dept. of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station: p. 1286-1296 (Vol. 191).
When this field guide was published in 1966, it was clear from the range map that, if I wanted to see a Limpkin in the US, I had to go to Florida.
The Limpkin range map from this popular 1966 field guide.
Growing up as a kid birder in the 1970s, this was one of my first field guides. I did not see my first Limpkin until decades later, in 2005. At that time, this freshwater snail and mussel specialist was still largely a Florida bird, with only a scattering of records north of their usual range.
Extra-limital records up thru 2015 (on eBird).
Between 1956 and 2015, eBird shows only 18 Limpkin sightings north of Charleston, South Carolina, though presumably some historical records have not been entered. Suffice it to say, a Limpkin in this region was a rarity. There were no Gulf Coast records in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama, and only a few in the Florida panhandle west of the Tallahassee area.
Suddenly, all this changed. 2019 saw records from Illinois, Ohio, Virginia, and coastal Louisiana, in addition to dozens of records from Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. 2020 and 2021 added a scattering of records from Texas to Minnesota(!) to Maryland.
The remarkable Limpkin invasion so far.
In 2022, they simply exploded, with first state records across much of the continent. 2023 looks like it is picking up where last year left off.
This kind of rapid range expansion is typically seen in invasive species who are introduced into a new ecosystem. They either die out or explode. The Limpkin invasion, however, is not because they have just arrived in Florida — they are a native species — but because the ecosystem north of Florida has been transformed by a warming climate. It is as if they have landed on a new continent. They are following food — an invasive apple snail, as well as freshwater mussels.
This kind of poleward range expansion is predicted with climate change and has already been documented in hundreds of species. See, for example, my posts here:
Amano et al. 2020. Responses of global waterbird populations to climate change vary with latitude. 10: 959-964.Chen et al. 2011. Rapid range shifts of species associated with high levels of climate warming. Science 333 (6045): 1024-1026.
Devictor et al 2008. Birds are tracking climate warming, but not fast enough. Proc. R. Soc. B 275, 2743–2748.
Hitch and Leberg. 2007. Breeding distributions of North American bird species moving north as a result of climate change. Conservation Biology 21(2): 534-9.
Langham et al 2015. Conservation status of North American birds in the face of future climate change. PLoS ONE 10(9): e0135350.
La Sorte, F.A., and F.R. Thompson III. 2007. Poleward shifts in winter ranges of North American birds. Ecology 88(7):1803–1812.
La Sorte FA and Jetz W. 2012. Tracking of climatic niche boundaries under recent climate change. J Anim Ecol. 81(4): 914-25.
Prince, K. and B. Zuckerberg. 2015. Climate change in our backyards: the reshuffling of North America’s winter bird communities. Global Change Biology 21(2): 572-585.
Stephens et al 2016. Consistent response of bird populations to climate change on two continents. Science 352(6281): 84-7.
Virkkala, R. and A. Lehikoinen 2014. Patterns of climate-induced density shifts of species: poleward shifts faster in northern boreal birds than in southern birds. Global Change Biology 20: 2995–3003.
[A more complete list of academic papers about birds and climate change, with highlighted abstracts, is available in the Documents section of the Birds and Climate Change Facebook group.]
Like many birds with expanding ranges, Limpkins have been slowly recovering for decades from historic habitat impacts. There are historic records (from the 1800s) from Georgia, which they did not occupy again meaningfully until 1994. Likewise, expansion into the Florida panhandle was not until the late 1980s. This fits the typical climate change pattern, with ecosystem changes beginning in the mid to late 1980s. Range expansions, however, can be variable, with different species crossing ecological and climatological thresholds at different times.
The current eBird status map for Limpkins shows them as regular from Houston to North Carolina.
Like most of the species shifting their ranges, Limpkins are generally non-migratory, though may have some seasonal movements based on water levels and foraging conditions. Most the recent northern records have been in summer. It is not known if these birds return south in fall, or die, not being able to withstand the winter. That said, they are undoubtedly establishing year-round presence in southern Louisiana (where the first state record was in 2018), and likely from Texas to South Carolina. There are recent winter records from Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Virginia.
The Limpkin may be one of the few species expanding poleward in both directions.
The Limpkin also ranges south into Central and South America. Its scientific name is Aramus guaranauna, the latter part being the Tupí name for it. Until 2018, it did not occur south of Bahia Blanca, Argentina (at least not in eBird). Its core range ended closer to Buenos Aires. However, with a record in 2018 and four more in 2020 (based on eBird, which is used less in South America), it has spread up to 700 miles south, mimicking its poleward spread in North America. Northern Ohio is also about 700 miles from the Limpkin’s core range in Florida. The southernmost record, found dead at Puerto Deseado, Argentina, is at 47.8 degrees south latitude. The northernmost record, just north of Minneapolis, is at 45.2 north latitude. Like a true invasive species, one even crossed the Andes!
Limpkins are not the only waterbird associated with Southeast wetlands that are expanding north. Birders have noticed northward range expansions among the following:
White Ibis
Neotropic Cormorant
Black-bellied Whistling Duck
Purple Gallinule
Anhinga
Roseate Spoonbill
and even Snail Kite, Swallow-tailed Kite, and Mississippi Kite
Many of these are actually declining in Florida (or Louisiana) as they increase in the north.
Indigenous Americans relied on observations of nature to provide information about weather, or when certain plants could be planted or harvested, or when certain fish or game were available. An Anhinga in New York, a Purple Gallinule in Ohio, White Ibises nesting in New Jersey, all of which have happened in this year – would be portents of change – or doom.
Miners kept canaries in coal mines to monitor the atmosphere. A sick or dead canary meant dangerous conditions in the mine. But imagine their surprise if their mine was suddenly invaded by a hundred canaries. That would mean something was amiss outside. Limpkins are becoming those canaries.
BREAKING: One day after posting this, a first record for Ontario, Canada.
UPDATE IN JULY 2023: Limpkin has reached Pennsylvania.
Over a year ago, on a webinar hosted by the Washington Ornithological Society (WOS), John Fitzpatrick of Cornell Lab of Ornithology teased us with some screenshots of eBird Trends maps. I was mesmerized. Now, they have been released here atthe eBird Science tab. These remarkable maps illustrate population trends for each species across their range, showing exactly where they are increasing (blue dots) or decreasing (red dots).
They do more than that, actually. The color of the dot is correlated to the rate of change — the % change between 2007 and 2021. Dark blue means really increasing; dark red really declining. The size of each dot is correlated to the size of the population in that area (or “relative abundance” in eBird lingo). Big dots mean there’s a lot of birds there, regardless of whether they are increasing or decreasing. If you hover over a dot, the actual numbers pop up. White dots mean the data are inconclusive or show no trend. You can read more of the details at the site, and perhaps I’ll discuss methodology on a later post.
Here’s the amazing thing — each dot represents a 27 x 27 km (16.7 x 16.7 mile) grid square, so just a bit larger than a Christmas Bird Count circle, which are 15 miles in diameter. That’s a remarkable level of detail. I joke that there’s more information in these maps than in all the ornithological research in the last ten years. That’s an overstatement, of course, because professional ornithologists study things that eBirders don’t. Nevertheless, these maps take crowdsourced data collection and present it in ways that are instantly useful for understanding species population trends at a granular level. This has profound implications for targeting conservation.
So, on to my first of probably many posts looking at these maps. My first peruse suggests they strongly support what the climate change research has been saying — that resident and short-distance migrants are shifting their ranges north. Let’s start with some common eastern species.
CLICK TO ENLARGE
To examine each map in detail, go to eBird’s Trends page, type in the species name, and then click “Trends” to the right of the species’ name.
Until now, most of the published literature on northward range shifts have been meta-analyses with conclusions such as “non-migratory species are shifting north by so many km per year”, but no maps, nor even mention of species by name. Here, we get the details in bright colors, at the species and even county level. Wow.
A few observations. For many species, they are declining where they are still common (the red dots are large), and increasing where they are less common or even rare (the blue dots are small). This probably implies that their overall population is declining. It also suggests that climate change may be hurting them in the south faster than it is helping them in the north. It takes time to establish new populations, and/or the new regions may not be as suitable as their old home. Note also that each of these species have different transition isoclines (if that’s what one would call it). For example, Red-bellied Woodpecker and Carolina Wren are increasing in Tennessee, but Tufted Titmouse are declining there.
Here are some relevant papers regarding range shifts in eastern species, but again, these maps communicate their results in new and vibrant ways:
Prince, K. and B. Zuckerberg. 2016. Climate change in our backyards: the reshuffling of North America’s winter bird communities. Global Change Biology 21(2): 572-585. We conclude that a shifting winter climate has provided an opportunity for smaller, southerly distributed species to colonize new regions and promote the formation of unique winter bird assemblages throughout eastern North America.
Rushing, C.S. et al. 2020. Migratory behavior and winter geography drive differential range shifts of eastern birds in response to recent climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(23), pp.12897-12903. Since the early 1970s, species that remain in North America throughout the year, including both resident and migratory species, appear to have responded to climate change through both colonization of suitable area at the northern leading edge of their breeding distributions and adaption in place at the southern trailing edges.
Saunders et al. 2022. Unraveling a century of global change impacts on winter bird distributions in the eastern United States. Global Change Biology We conclude that climate has generally governed the winter occurrence of avifauna in space and time, while [habitat] change has played a pivotal role in driving distributional dynamics of species with limited and declining habitat availability.
In future posts, I’ll look at range shifts in resident birds of the West, the impact of California’s fires (many encompassing several of these Trends dots), long-distance migrants, nationwide species, waterbirds, and seabirds, among other things.
Many papers predict that bird ranges will shift northward with a warming climate (Wu et al 2018, Langham et al 2015).
Many studies have already documented that this is happening (Illán et al. 2014, Virkkala, R. and A. Lehikoinen 2014, Hitch and Leberg 2007, and La Sorte and Thompson 2007).
And some have documented poleward range shifts specifically for wintering ranges (Saunders et al 2022, Hampton 2019, Paprocki et al 2017, Prince and Zuckerberg 2016, and Paprocki et al 2014).
I’ve previously written about an increase in insectivore bird species in winter associated with a warming climate in the Sacramento Valley. As the Putah Creek Christmas Bird Count (CBC) compiler, it was hard not to notice the trends. Cassin’s Vireo, Black-throated Gray and Townsend’s Warblers, and Western Tanagers were becoming more expected in winter. We had crossed a threshold; we didn’t get freezes anymore. My bougainvillea and cape honeysuckle, which previously clung to life in winter, were now growing and blooming year-round. Fruit and insects were available to these birds.
Now in Port Townsend, Washington, we set a local CBC record for Yellow-rumped Warblers last year. This caused me to take a closer look at the data, focusing on Passerines that are rare or uncommon, and at the northern edge of their wintering range. They are: Hermit Thrush, Cedar Waxwing, Lincoln’s Sparrow, White-crowned Sparrow, Orange-crowned Warbler, and Yellow-rumped Warbler. For each of these, the PNW is at the northern limits of their wintering range.
I looked at their numbers and trends on the Portland, Olympia, Seattle, Bellingham, and Vancouver BC CBCs since the 76th CBC (winter 1975-76). I’ve got more notes on my methodology at the end.
Results
All have increased since 1975, generally with the uptick beginning in the 1990s. Here are the results of my inquiry.
The range maps are from eBird’s Abundance Maps. Red=summer; blue=winter; purple=year-round; yellow=migration. The graphs show the birds per party hour across the five CBCs, taking the total number of birds and dividing by the total number of hours across all five counts.
Hermit Thrush
Hermit Thrush has been increasing at a rate of 4.2% per year across all the CBCs. It has been increasing across all five of the counts, most strongly in Vancouver (4.1% annual growth) and most tepid in Seattle (0.6%). It is most common on the Portland count, which has averaged 26 Hermit Thrushes per count since 2009.
Cedar Waxwing
Of the six species I focused on, Cedar Waxwing showed some of the most erratic growth, averaging only 2.5% per year. That said, it has been above average 8 of the last 9 years. To illustrate the unpredictable nature of waxwings, they have actually been declining on the Olympia (-2.3%/yr) and Vancouver (-4.1%/yr) counts. They are increasing the most on the Portland count (3.0%/yr).
Lincoln’s Sparrow
Lincoln’s Sparrow has been increasing steadily, from near zero, at an overall rate of 3.6% per year. To put this in perspective, these five CBCs tallied 5 or fewer individuals, summed across all counts, in each of the first five years of this analysis. In each of the last five years, these counts, in aggregate, tallied between 34 and 52 individuals. Growth has been strongest on the Olympia count (4.6%/yr) and weakest on the Bellingham count (1.7%/yr).
White-crowned Sparrow
Despite the eBird map, White-crowned Sparrow is a regular overwintering species in the PNW. The five counts, in aggregate, tally between 100 and 750 individuals each year. They’ve been increasing at a rate of 1.8% per year, strongest in Seattle (3.1%/yr) and weakest in Vancouver (-2.5%/yr, the only count with declining numbers).
Orange-crowned Warbler
Orange-crowned Warbler has seen dramatic increases, averaging 5.0% per year, highest in Olympia (7.2%/yr) and lowest in Bellingham (3.2%/yr). The numbers, however, are still small. Aggregate numbers across all counts were zero five of the first eleven years of this analysis (easily seen on the graph). Double digits were not reached until 1999. The last ten years, however, have averaged 15 individuals across all the counts, making this an expected species in winter now.
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Yellow-rumped Warbler wins the award for poster child of species increasing in winter at the northern edge of their wintering range. They’ve been increasing at a rate of 5.3% per year. Interestingly, this growth is concentrated in the south. Portland (3.7%/yr), Olympia (3.4%/yr), and Seattle (6.1%/yr) have seen the most growth, while Bellingham (-0.5%) and Vancouver (-5.0%) have seen declines. Perhaps those Fraser River winds are too cold for warblers.
Methodology
The data includes bird per party hour for the Portland, Olympia, Seattle, Bellingham, and Vancouver BC Christmas Bird Counts from the 75th count (winter 1975-76) to the 120th count (winter 2019-20). The 121st count was impacted by the pandemic.
CBC (and Breeding Bird Survey) data is uniquely advantageous for looking at long-term trends such as climate change, as they both go back many decades with generally similar effort over time (for certain well-established counts). Nevertheless, there were some issues with this data:
I did not use the Portland data from the 76th thru the 82nd count, due to aberrantly low party hours relative to later counts.
The following data was missing entirely from the Audubon CBC database: Olympia 76th, 77th, 78th, 84th, 104th, and 110th counts; and Seattle 91st count.
The following counts had no (or obviously incorrect) data for party hours: Portland 104th count; Bellingham 111th, 112th, and 119th counts. Because they did have bird numbers, I approximated the party hours based on their counts in nearby years. I used 230 party hours for the Portland count and 200 party hours for the Bellingham counts.
Other climate-related bird changes in the Pacific Northwest
I’ve previously blogged about climate change and birds in the Pacific Northwest:
The invasion of the Pacific Northwest: California’s birds expand north with warmer winters looks at northward range expansions of Great Egret, Turkey Vulture, Red-shouldered Hawk, Anna’s Hummingbird, Black Phoebe, Townsend’s Warbler, and California Scrub-Jay, with some discussion of others as well. Note that Townsend’s Warbler, as a migrant that winters rarely in the PNW, fits with the group of birds described in this post.
Hampton, S. 2019. Avian responses to rapid climate change: Examples from the Putah Creek Christmas Bird Count. Central Valley Birds 22(4): 77-89.
Hitch and Leberg. 2007. Breeding distributions of North American bird species moving north as a result of climate change. Conservation Biology 21(2): 534-9.
Illán et al. 2014. Precipitation and winter temperature predict long-term range-scale abundance changes in Western North American birds. Global Change Biology, 20 (11), 3351–3364.
Langham et al 2015. Conservation status of North American birds in the face of future climate change. PLoS ONE 10(9): e0135350.
La Sorte, F.A., and F.R. Thompson III. 2007. Poleward shifts in winter ranges of North American birds. Ecology 88(7):1803–1812.
Paprocki et al. 2014. Regional Distribution Shifts Help Explain Local Changes in Wintering Raptor Abundance: Implications for Interpreting Population Trends. PLoS ONE 9(1): e86814.
Paprocki et al. 2017. Combining migration and wintering counts to enhance understanding of population change in a generalist raptor species, the North American Red-tailed Hawk. The Condor, 119 (1): 98–107.
Prince, K. and B. Zuckerberg. 2016. Climate change in our backyards: the reshuffling of North America’s winter bird communities. Global Change Biology 21(2): 572-585.
Saunders et al. 2022. Unraveling a century of global change impacts on winter bird distributions in the eastern United States. Global Change Biology
Virkkala, R. and A. Lehikoinen 2014. Patterns of climate-induced density shifts of species: poleward shifts faster in northern boreal birds than in southern birds. Global Change Biology 20: 2995–3003.
Wu et al. 2018. Projected avifaunal responses to climate change across the U.S. National Park System. PLOS ONE 13(3): e0190557.
At 9:30am on August 17, that is, yesterday, I got a text from another birder. A Nazca Booby had just been seen from Discovery Point near Seattle. What’s more, we knew exactly where the bird was now; it was perched on the bow of a barge being pulled by the tug Seaspan Raider.
The Nazca Booby, atop the barge, photographed by Matt Stolmeier, captain for Outer Island Excursions.
The Nazca Booby is a tropical seabird that breeds exclusively on the Galapagos Islands. When not nesting, it occurs at sea in the eastern Pacific, generally between central Mexico and northern Peru.
Breeding (orange) and non-breeding (blue) range of the Nazca Booby.
This was Washington’s third record. The first, quite possibly the same bird, was on August 14, 2020, in pretty much the same part of Puget Sound. The second was a few weeks ago also off Seattle. That one was an immature, not an adult, so we know it was a different individual. It then showed up off Victoria, providing Canada with its third record.
The Nazca Booby first arrived in the United States in California in 2013. I actually played a role in that first record, a dead beachcast bird found in the aftermath of an oil spill. Working for the state’s spill response, I brought it to the attention of the California Bird Records Committee and had experts examine the carcass for identification. That bird was not a one-off event; it was the beginning of an invasion. There were a few scattered records in the following years, followed by an explosion of 26 records in 2018 and 21 in 2019. After that, California removed the species from its “review list”. While some of these records may have been the same individuals, it is remarkable that a tropical bird previously unheard-of in the US was suddenly widespread. Oregon got its first two records in 2018 and 2019.
Sea surface temperature (SST) of 66.1F off the Washington/Oregon coast.
Checking sea surface temperatures, I see that the water off the Washington and Oregon coasts is reaching 66F in places, only 4F cooler than on the south side of the Galapagos. Zooming out, it is easy to see a route from there to here where the bird never had to encounter sea surface temps under 60F. The Strait of Juan de Fuca is in the low 50s, but it does approach 60F near Seattle.
I opened the MarineTraffic app and quickly located the Seaspan Raider. It was southwest of Edmunds, northbound at 7.3 knots. I calculated it would arrive off Port Townsend between 1 and 2pm. Birders scrambled, heading to various coastal promontories on both sides of Puget Sound. I headed to Point Wilson, where Puget Sound effectively ends and meets the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The tug, bound for Canada, would have to pass by me here.
Reports came in. The bird had flown off the barge. It was in the water off Edmunds. It took off. It was seen from both sides. No one knew where it was.
Tracking the tug using the MarineTraffic app.
This wasn’t the only booby in the Salish Sea at the moment. A Brown Booby had been photographed a few days earlier near the San Juans. That was yet another tropical seabird that had already invaded the US, with records from over forty states, including Alaska. Two decades ago, this would have been unimaginable. And this summer, 2022, was already noteworthy across the Midwest and East Coast for the mass invasion of waterbirds typically found only in Florida or the Gulf Coast. Limpkins, Wood Storks, White Ibis, Roseate Spoonbills and many others were showing up hundreds of miles north of their previously known ranges.
Scrolling thru the American Birding Association Rare Bird Alert nationwide posts, limited to just mega-rarities, here is what pops up: Brown Booby in Oklahoma, Neotropic Cormorant in North Carolina, Brown Booby in Wisconsin, two Swallow-tailed Kites in Ohio, Limpkin in Wisconsin, Neotropic Cormorant in Michigan, White Ibis in New York, Wood Stork in Pennsylvania, Heermann’s Gull in Alaska, Limpkin in Illinois, Nazca Booby in California, White Ibis in Nebraska, etc. And that doesn’t even get us back to August 1. These are all birds, mostly aquatic birds, well north of their normal ranges.
Our current rate of climate warming hasn’t been seen since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 55 million years ago. Then, there were alligators within the Arctic Circle. Kind of like Nazca Boobies are now a thing in Puget Sound. Actually, our current rate of warming is much faster than then. During the PETM, the climate warmed 5C in five thousand years. The current rate of warming is eighteen times faster. Then, no one would have noticed. Now, there is 1C of warming – and, with it, dramatic changes in climate and ecology – within the lifespan of a single bird. Some seabirds are showing us that they can keep up, thanks to their ability to fly long distances. I’m not sure about the alligators. Or birds that depend, say, on oak trees. The birds can fly, but the oaks can’t.
Two hours passed. I was ready to give up and head home, my only consolation being “MAMU CF”, a Marbled Murrelet making a provisioning flight across the Sound, carrying a fish to its single chick somewhere on a moss-covered Doug fir branch a hundred feet above the forest floor, probably in the Olympic Mountains. I’d only seen that once before. Much of their range in California has been lost to fires in the past five years, so this Olympic chick is important.
The original photo of the Nazca Booby on the barge, by Alex Meilleur.
One birder, who was unable to search for the Nazca Booby, called some of the local orca boats, as he worked on some of them. He let them know about the bird, as some were near it. About twenty minutes later, texts came in. They had re-found it! It was back on the same barge, now approaching Marrowstone Point. I spun my scope south. There, beyond the ferry lane, I could make out the red and white structure of the Seaspan Raider, pulling its barge, all blurry and shimmering in the distant heat mirage, slowly chugging toward me.
Taking advantage of the outgoing tide, the Seaspan Raider was now hitting 9 knots. It is powered by two Niigata 6m G25HX diesel engines. I don’t know what kind of gas mileage it gets, but, because it presumably refueled in Washington, most of its fuel is likely conventional diesel, but a small component may be renewable diesel.
Renewable diesel is not the same as biodiesel. Biodiesel can be mixed with conventional diesel, but only in very small amounts, like 2%. Renewable diesel, on the other hand, is molecularly identical to conventional diesel. It’s a relatively new invention. Made from non-petroleum sources, such as plant and animal material, it is to conventional diesel what corn syrup is to sugar; it is a “drop-in ready” alternative fuel. It can be mixed with or substituted for conventional diesel seamlessly, with no change in gas pumps, pipelines, or engines. In fact, it burns slightly cleaner, so engines last longer. It emits fewer particulates and, most importantly, its greenhouse gas footprint is up to 80% less. Its use is already widespread in California, where two of the state’s largest refineries no longer take petroleum crude.
This is the kind of thing that should have been developed thirty years ago, just after James Hansen of NOAA briefed congress on climate change in 1986. Now it’s late. We’ve already had more than 1C of climate warming, with more coming and probably ten feet of sea level rise built into the system. Stopping carbon emissions is no longer a suitable goal. We’ve already pushed the cart down the ramp. It’s rolling. We need to reverse climate change, to change that ramp so the cart rolls back to where it was. That will require actually sucking CO2 out of the air – negative emissions – which will certainly take a hundred years under the most optimistic scenarios. So get ready for more boobies, maybe even Limpkins and alligators.
Aside about Washington: Washington further delayed action a few years ago when the Department of Ecology required an Environmental Impact Statement from Phillips 66 to convert their refinery at Cherry Point to make renewable diesel. That is to say, Phillips needed to jump through major permitting hurdles because they were changing – that is, reducing — their greenhouse gas emissions. Phillips didn’t want to wait the several years required for this, so they promptly moved their operation to California. Governor Inslee tried to intervene and save the project, but it was too late. Now BP is picking up the baton in Washington.
Renewable diesel is already in widespread use in trucks, especially in California. The ferries in San Francisco Bay are powered exclusively by it. Because diesel is similar to jet fuel, and made during the same refining process, refineries also produce what is called sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Aircraft are currently permitted to fly with up to a 50/50 blend of SAF and conventional jet fuel. Boeing promises jets that can fly with 100% SAF by 2030. We’ll be approaching 1.5C of warming by then. Nazca Booby will almost certainly be off the rare bird review list, at least in California. Brown Boobies will be breeding on the Farallones and prospecting further north.
I watched as orca boats came and went from the barge, photographing the Nazca Booby. I was told it was on the starboard side of the roof of the little structure on the bow. The tug and barge continued up Admiralty Inlet until it was straight out from me, as close as it would pass. Slightly more than halfway across the channel, it remained blurred in heat mirage. I could see fuzzy white dots on the described rooftop, but I couldn’t tell you if they were Nazca Boobies or gulls or volleyballs. In birder’s lingo, this was going to be a ‘dip’, even though I knew exactly where the bird was and was looking at it.
My view of the tug, barge, and bird.
Mathematically, this would be at least the sixth time a Nazca Booby had passed this point, my point, my sea watch. And this time I was here, ready and waiting, and still I couldn’t see it. Were it not for the texts and the orca boats, I’d never know it was there. I kept my scope glued to it, hoping it would lift off in a distinctive flight and head directly toward me, where it would join the Caspian Terns and plunge dive right in front of me as I clicked my camera in ecstasy. But it didn’t. The tug and barge chugged north.
The bird was last seen at Partridge Point on Whidbey Island, still riding the barge. It was off the barge by Rosario Inlet. I’m guessing it jumped ship and headed toward Victoria or Smith Island.
The barge’s destination was the Lafarge Texada Quarrying Ltd. limestone mine north of Vancouver. Limestone is critical to making cement. The cement-making process is responsible for 8% of the world’s carbon emissions. Part of that is from the energy used in production, which requires a kiln heated to 1,400 degrees Celsius. But most of the emissions comes from the limestone itself. Forty percent of the weight of limestone is CO2, and this is burned off in the process. There are efforts to improve the cement-making process, to make it less dependent on limestone, to reduce its carbon emissions. That’s all coming in the future.
The limestone mine at Beale Cove, the barge’s destination.
I’m wondering about the ancient Nazca civilization in what is now Peru. It was dependent on a remarkable network of underground aqueducts that delivered mountain water to their arid home. There’s a theory that they over-harvested a certain tree, which led to erosion of riversides during heavy rains, destroying their water delivery system. I wonder if they had meetings about the problem, if they had new policies in effect, at least at the end, when it was too late.
It’s supposed to be 95F in the Seattle suburbs today. I’m not worried about missing this Nazca Booby. There will be more.
The Nazca Booby on the bow. I’m sure the scope views were better. Photo by Laura Brou.
A number of recent academic papers have described northward shifts of bird species in both North America and Europe, driven by climate change. These papers usually present aggregated results from dozens of species; they rarely provide details for any specific species. These maps are intended to offer that.
While there are tremendous species-specific differences, non-migratory resident birds (such as Northern Cardinal, Carolina Wren, Tufted Titmouse, and Red-bellied Woodpecker) appear to be the most adaptable and have expanded their ranges the most. This seems to be primarily driven by warmer winters and, for some species, is further augmented by bird feeders.
I created these maps using eBird, so the usual caveats apply– they don’t necessarily include all records (though many historical out-of-range records are indeed included), and eBird reporting, which became widespread only after 2010, continues to increase dramatically each year. To draw the lines, my intent was to capture the primary range area — and more — but I deliberately excluded the furthest ten to fifteen outliers for each line.
CLICK TO ENLARGE GRAPHICS
Northern Cardinals (once called Kentucky Cardinals) have been expanding north for decades, but have increased their rate.Carolina Wren is a classic example of a species knocked back by harsh winters, finding some refuge around bird feeders, and then continuing to expand in warmer winters. See a graph of this at my previous post here.Like many species, Tufted Titmouse has especially expanded northeast up the St. Lawrence River corridor.To get a feel for what this expansion actually looks like in one place, see the graphs below from Christmas Bird Counts. Similar graphs could be made for all of these species.
Two of the academic papers that report climate-driven range expansions in eastern North America are listed below, along with their abstracts.
Prince, K. and B. Zuckerberg. 2016. Climate change in our backyards: the reshuffling of North America’s winter bird communities. Global Change Biology 21(2): 572-585.
Much of the recent changes in North American climate have occurred during the winter months, and as result, overwintering birds represent important sentinels of anthropogenic climate change. While there is mounting evidence that bird populations are responding to a warming climate (e.g., poleward shifts) questions remain as to whether these species-specific responses are resulting in community-wide changes. Here, we test the hypothesis that a changing winter climate should favor the formation of winter bird communities dominated by warm-adapted species. To do this, we quantified changes in community composition using a functional index–the Community Temperature Index (CTI)–which measures the balance between low- and high-temperature dwelling species in a community. Using data from Project FeederWatch, an international citizen science program, we quantified spatiotemporal changes in winter bird communities (n = 38 bird species) across eastern North America and tested the influence of changes in winter minimum temperature over a 22-year period. We implemented a jackknife analysis to identify those species most influential in driving changes at the community level and the population dynamics (e.g., extinction or colonization) responsible for these community changes. Since 1990, we found that the winter bird community structure has changed with communities increasingly composed of warm-adapted species. This reshuffling of winter bird communities was strongest in southerly latitudes and driven primarily by local increases in abundance and regional patterns of colonization by southerly birds. CTI tracked patterns of changing winter temperature at different temporal scales ranging from 1 to 35 years. We conclude that a shifting winter climate has provided an opportunity for smaller, southerly distributed species to colonize new regions and promote the formation of unique winter bird assemblages throughout eastern North America.
Saunders et al. 2022. Unraveling a century of global change impacts on winter bird distributions in the eastern United States. Global Change Biology
One of the most pressing questions in ecology and conservation centers on disentangling the relative impacts of concurrent global change drivers, climate and land-use/land-cover (LULC), on biodiversity. Yet studies that evaluate the effects of both drivers on species’ winter distributions remain scarce, hampering our ability to develop full-annual-cycle conservation strategies. Additionally, understanding how groups of species differentially respond to climate versus LULC change is vital for efforts to enhance bird community resilience to future environmental change. We analyzed long-term changes in winter occurrence of 89 species across nine bird groups over a 90-year period within the eastern United States using Audubon Christmas Bird Count (CBC) data. We estimated variation in occurrence probability of each group as a function of spatial and temporal variation in winter climate (minimum temperature, cumulative precipitation) and LULC (proportion of group-specific and anthropogenic habitats within CBC circle). We reveal that spatial variation in bird occurrence probability was consistently explained by climate across all nine species groups. Conversely, LULC change explained more than twice the temporal variation (i.e., decadal changes) in bird occurrence probability than climate change on average across groups. This pattern was largely driven by habitat-constrained species (e.g., grassland birds, waterbirds), whereas decadal changes in occurrence probabilities of habitat-unconstrained species (e.g., forest passerines, mixed habitat birds) were equally explained by both climate and LULC changes over the last century. We conclude that climate has generally governed the winter occurrence of avifauna in space and time, while LULC change has played a pivotal role in driving distributional dynamics of species with limited and declining habitat availability. Effective land management will be critical for improving species’ resilience to climate change, especially during a season of relative resource scarcity and critical energetic trade-offs.
Like so many species, the Carolina Wren is expanding northward. And, like many of those species, this expansion started decades ago, before any measurable climate change, but has exploded in the past decades with climate change.
The Carolina Wren has been expanding north since the 1800s due to habitat recovery after deforestation (Haggerty and Morton, 2020 – the Birds of North America (BNA) species account). What makes the recent Carolina Wren data so interesting is that we can clearly see, in its expansion into Canada, its battle with winter weather conditions.
The raw number of Carolina Wrens reported on Christmas Bird Counts in Canada. Over 95% of these come from southern Ontario. The cold waves marked on the graph were particularly record-breaking and long-lasting.
The species is known for “decimation… by severe winter conditions” (BNA) at the northern limits of its range. The same account notes that “severe winters have apparently been infrequent enough during the 20th century to allow populations to expand and move northward.” Indeed, one of the key conclusions of an analysis of climate change in southern Ontario was that there has been “a decrease in the frequency of cold temperature extremes”. While the wren is aided against cold snaps by bird feeders, the climate trend, at least in Canada, is in its favor. The report noted an overall average increase of 1.5C.
eBird abundance map. The Carolina Wren has primarily been a species of edge habitat associated with moist southern forests.
As the wren expanded, certain record-breaking and persistent cold waves knocked the population back, where it restarted. It’s also clear that it is restarting from a higher position each time, thus building its numbers and continuing its expansion.
The cold snaps denoted on the graph were particularly severe in southern Ontario. A more detailed look at weather data may reveal a more complicated pattern and even greater correlation to warmer winters.
Predicted range changes for Carolina Wren by National Audubon under 1.5C scenario. This map is fairly accurate as the bird continues to colonize the St. Lawrence River corridor.eBird map for December 2021 showing colonization from Toronto to Ottawa and Montreal and nearly to Quebec City.A Carolina Wren fluffed up against the cold. Pic from National Audubon website.
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