Distraction Displays: Mass Breeding Bird Atlas 2

I Guess We'll Call This One "Sox"

Many people woke today to a front-page story in the Boston Globe about a fiesty Red-tailed Hawk at Fenway. It seems a middle school student from Connecticut was touring Fenway Park, and a local Red-tailed Hawk played some tough defense in the outfield. If you missed the story you'll find it at:

http://www.boston.com/

The series of photos on today's front page that seem to tell a story different from the headline "On The Attack at Fenway". The series begins with a shot of the bird from the the front, looking to it's right, as one girls walks into the fame in the seats below, possibly to join another girl at the railing. The bird is between the photographer and the girls. The bird seems to be the focus of the photo, like the photographer was intentionally shooting the bird. While it is not possible to tell, it looks like the photographer may have been quite close to the bird.

In the second frame, the bird has taken off, and is flying away from the photographer, flapping with its legs down - a typical take-off for a heavy bird. It seems prudent to wonder if the bird was simply losing altitude on take-off, possibly started by the photographer, rather than hitting the girl as a nest defense? The headline "On The Attack at Fenway" might misrepresent the cause of the accident.

We read the story about four different ways. First, as parents, feeling empathy for the student. Obviously to her it doesn't matter if the bird was defending a nest or was startled by a photographer - it hit her on the head! The report says the student was (thankfully) OK, but the experience must have been alarming.

Invariably the next hat we put on in this office is the Atlas Hat - "Wow, what a great Confirmation. Was Red-tail Confirmed in this block last year?". Yes, it was confirmed - but with the wrong code (PY was used, and that is only for precocial young - more on that in another post). The correct code would be either NY or FL. Interestingly, Red-tail was not even recorded as "X" for that block (Boston South 7) in Atlas 1.

It is easy to forget that Red-tail numbers were quite diminished in most of the state in the early 1900s, and their range is still expanding. In the last week we have gotten 3 other reports of obvious Red-tailed Hawk nests in Boston - and there are many more. Red-tail vs. human conflicts are rare (you'd expect it from a Goshawk or Peregrine), but, not impossible. I think it is important to consider that this may not have been an "attack" - simply a bird startled by a photographer.

Short-eared Owls Courting at Daniel Webster Sanctuary

The following is from an in-house Mass Audubon newsletter. Keep your eyes peeled for any courtship behavior around winter roost sites for both Short-eared and Long-eared Owls.

Short-eared owls nesting at Daniel Webster?
During the first Massachusetts Breeding Bird Atlas project, short-eared owls were confirmed to be breeding in only eight blocks in the state, all on Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Monomoy. After one year of data collection, volunteers conducting the surveys for the Breeding Bird Atlas II have confirmed only one nesting site, Tuckernuck Island, off Nantucket. Early this month, though, atlaser Glenn D’Entremont witnessed a sure sign of courtship at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary when he watched a short-eared owl clapping its wings underneath its body in flight, an attempt by a male to win the attention of a female. Eyes are glued to the sanctuary’s grasslands for further evidence, and the possibility of only the second confirmed short-eared owl nesting site in the state during this Breeding Bird Atlas cycle.

BirdWatch Canada Newsletter

Off we go - let me direct you to a recent Bird Studies Canada Newsletter. Ontario has just completed their second BBA (applause point here), and among the myriad of results they found notable declines among many aerial insectivores – declines mirrored in the Breeding Bird Survey data. When these two robust and carefully managed data sets resonate with the same results we really ought to pay attention.

The species of concern - as ecologically diverse as Whip-poor-will and Eastern Wood-Pewee - are linked by their food preference - insects. Teasing apart the causes of declines, and weighing the influence of the various factors that can cause this broad set of species to decline will be daunting. The report suggests that New York found similar results during the data crunching of their recently completed BBA 2, and data from the first year of the Maritimes BBA2 sound the same alarms. Hmmm.

So, what do we know about Massachusetts?

The table below is from the USGS Breeding Bird Survey results, 1966-2006, and presents statistically significant changes for the aerial insectivores in Massachusetts. These data are available at http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/bbs/

        Species                 % Annual Change 1966-2006

Chimney Swift                       -2.1%

Willow Flycatcher                   +4.4

Willow/Alder Flycatcher         +3.3

Least Flycatcher                    -4.3

Eastern Phoebe                     -1.5

Great Crested Flycatcher        -1.7

Eastern Kingbird                    -3.7

Certainly the species with BBS declines are ringing bells as we look at our first year's data. We will take a long look at the status of these species from the 2007 results of Mass BBA 2, and post those preliminary results soon.

Meanwhile, have a read of the BSC piece linked above (there are some funky letter spacing issues in the typesetting, but, a bonus of the piece is you get to brush-up on your French) and ruminate on the problem. Could the North Country really be running low on insects in the summer; or are the "bugs" and birds getting out of sync? The list of mechanisms for insect declines is a rap sheet of the ususal suspects: light and water pollution, wetland acidification, pervasive pesticide use. Along with all of that are air and water temperature fluctuations due to climate change (the 400 pound Silverback Mountain Gorilla in the room) causing phenological changes of insect hatchings .

It might be time to buy a hybrid car, turn off the lights, and let the lawn go to seed.

Welcome!

Welcome to the first post of the Massachusetts Breeding Bird Atlas 2 Blog. The name, “Distraction Displays” was the winning entry in an in-house blog-naming suggest-a-thon. Distraction Displays, DD for short, is a code atlasers use to describe a highly dramatic performance given by a breeding bird to lure a suspected predator away from a nest. Think Killdeer dragging a wing, running in circles, flopping and feigning injury, more urgent and distressed than any star from a silent film, and you can envision a distraction display.

Blogs are notorious for distracting their owners and readers, often pulling them away from more pressing work. We like the double entendre of the name, and while Atlas Blogged was a close second place finisher, in the end DD won out. Unlike the Killdeer we welcome the distraction, and we will try to keep the drama to a minimum.

The BBA2 is an information-rich project, and the folks in the field are passionate about this work. The collision of more than 1,000 survey blocks, 350+ field volunteers, and 200 nesting species combine to make 70,000,000 possible experiences – and sometimes it seems like we have a question for each ones. DD is a place to respond to these questions, and a place to share links to other bird conservation news stories in a casual and (hopefully) entertaining setting.

We need to warn you that we will be slow to post comments to the blog - nothing personal, but we are, as the Pentagon says, task saturated. We welcome your civil and appropriate Breeding-Bird-O-Centric photos and comments, questions, ruminations, links to other blogs, professional papers and news stories, reports, newsletters, etc. Originally blogs were annotated lists of interesting web sites, and we encourage you to send links to your favorite birding sites. To submit a comment to a post scroll past the post and there is a spot for entering comments. To submit an original post please send it with as little formatting as possible to birdatlas@massaudubon.org.

Go easy on us - the learning curve is steep, and we only have a few hours a week for this.

Here goes....