New England Avian Experts Flock to R.I. for Audubon Bird Symposium
By Colleen Cronin / ecoRI News
staff
The Audubon Society of Rhode Island held its second Bird
Symposium on Sunday, inviting dozens of experts from around New England to
discuss the latest ornithological research and solutions for protecting species
around the region and beyond.
Photo by Will Collette
Audubon jam-packed the event’s schedule with
lectures about songs of swamp sparrows to the impacts of artificial light on
bird migration.
Bird-science heavyweights Carl
Safina, author of “Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans
Believe,” and Harvard professor Scott Edwards book-ended the
conference. Safina spoke about his book and the pressures facing birds, while
Edwards highlighted the need for diversity in ornithology and the natural and
sociological themes of his lauded cross-country bicycle trip.
Organizers recorded all of the Feb. 3 lectures, which
will soon be available on AudubonRI’s YouTube channel, but in the meantime,
here’s four takeaways from the day’s events:
Birds are struggling — in Rhode Island and elsewhere.
The number 3 billion got thrown around a lot, in
reference to how many birds have been lost out of the net population since
1970.
Many of the species’ losses include American sparrows, old world sparrows, blackbirds, and larks, according to University of Rhode Island professor Peter Paton. Paton has studied birds in Kingston since the 1990s, picking up on the work of the late Doug Kraus, who started the study in 1960.
Records from both scientists show decreases in many
species’ presence at their research site near the university, some as much as
70% or 80%.
“It’s not a pleasant story,” Paton said.
But it’s not fruitless, he added. Actions as simple as
keeping cats indoors, adding decals to large windows, and planting native
vegetation can all prevent bird mortality.
Renewable energy could impact birds, and people are
trying to find ways to mitigate that.
Shilo Felton, a senior scientist at the Renewable
Energy Wildlife Institute, gave a presentation on ways the solar and
wind industries could avoid and reduce their impacts on birds and bats.
“Nothing’s a silver bullet,” she said. But she noted
there are a lot of best practices that can be implemented and innovations that
are in the works.
Felton grouped actions companies can take into three
categories: avoid, minimize, and compensate.
Avoidance techniques come in mostly during decisions over
where to site solar or wind projects. She gave the example of the decision to
exclude Nantucket Shoals — the shelf off the southern coast of Nantucket, Mass.
— from wind development because it is an important bird habitat.
After developments have a location, minimizing impact
through natural vegetation, in the case of ground-mounted solar arrays, to
maintain some habitat, or implementing an operational pause, in the case of
turbines, to avoid hitting birds and bats during their most active periods, can
help reduce bird takes.
The compensation — which Felton said could also be
referred to as “restore” or “offset” — is usually regulated, formula-based, and
focused on reducing takes of species in other situations, like having a wind
company contribute to a lead mitigation fund to prevent more lead-related eagle
takes.
Saltmarsh sparrows are a sexy (and a little sad) bird to
study in the ornithology world.
Four different presentations from three different states
focused entirely on saltmarsh sparrows, a little golden-brown bird that nests
in marsh grasses.
Climate change is threatening salt marshes around
New England and the sparrows named
after them.
The sparrows are “living on the edge,” in more ways than
one, Grace McCullough, a master’s student at the University of New Hampshire
who studies the birds,
said.
They nest in grasses on the marsh and need about 26 days
without tidal flooding for eggs to become fledglings. But as high tides move
farther and farther up the shore as sea levels rise, there are fewer suitable
locations to raise young.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service considers
the birds “vulnerable.”
In the course of her study, McCullough found maintaining
elevation is pivotal to the species’ survival. “A few centimeters can make the
difference between a successful nest and a failed nest,” she said.
There are some success stories.
“I have good news,” Lincoln Dark, a Rhode Island native
and AudubonRI volunteer, said to start his talk, “which is something you might
not have heard a lot of today.”
Dark works as the coordinator for the
organization’s surveys of ospreys, a
bird he said is making a comeback.
In the 1970s, the prevalent use of DDT had almost wiped
out the shore raptor in Rhode Island. Poisoning and thinning shells caused by
the chemical left only 13 mating pairs in the state that year.
Today, since the prohibition of DDT, ospreys have come
back, and more than 200 pairs now live along the Ocean State’s coast.
Dark said there is more to study, like temperatures
impacts on the birds, and that AudubonRI is always looking for more volunteers
to monitor nests.
