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According to this story, Red Kites have been reintroduced to Northern Ireland after an absence of 200 years. There’s a new star in the County Down, apparently.

The Irish have been busy reintroducing other raptors as well. This link includes a photo of the majestic White-tailed Eagle that has been reintroduced in County Kerry. The photo, however, was taken in County Down. I guess it’s time for me to plan another trip to the homeland, and to make sure Down is on the itinerary!

I received the latest installment of the “Audubon Eider eNews” newsletter today, and it had lots of great information on bird conservation in Alaska. The most interesting tidbit was this:

“Will Drilling in the Arctic Refuge Lower Gas Prices?
As the U.S. faces record prices at the pump, President Bush and pro-drilling advocates insist that opening the Arctic Refuge to oil development is the answer. Ironically, the Bush Administration’s own Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently reported that even at peak production in 2027, the oil produced from the Refuge would only reduce the price of a barrel of oil by 78 cents. Increased conservation and use of alternative technologies would yield nearly ten times more savings than what consumers would ever get from drilling in the Arctic Refuge, based on the EIA’s report.”

This is why it simply isn’t worth despoiling the Arctic National Wildlife for the oil it might produce. We are America, dang it! We can and should do better!

For more great updates on conservation issues related to our native birds, check out the “Audubon Action” website.

Last night I had the rare opportunity to watch Chimney Swifts come in to their evening roost. They’ve provided me with another wildlife mystery, however. Their roost is somewhere on top of a high rise dormitory on the OSU campus, and there ain’t no chimneys up there.

Chimney Swifts are fascinating creatures. Most closely related to hummingbirds, swifts may spend more time on the wing than any other birds. I’ve read that swifts eat, drink, mate, and even sleep on the wing. If that last one is true, then they must get a lot out of little power naps!

Chimney Swift portrait, Powdermill Nature Reserve

Most folks are familiar with swifts - they are pretty conspicuous - but they’re probably often mistaken for swallows or bats. Some folks get the chance to experience swifts up close and personal: occasionally, babies will fall from their chimney nests and be found clinging to the side of a homeowner’s fireplace. But most of us know them simply as twittering little black boomerangs strung through cigars that can do about Mach 3 in a straightaway.

They fly more slowly when coming to roost. Last night right at 9 pm when the full, red moon had just risen in the east, I noticed our resident flock of about 50 swifts circling and twittering over the roof of Kerr Hall. I had seen them do this before, so I figured they must be roosting somewhere on the roof of that building. The roof, however, is flat, and there are no chimneys.

As the minutes passed and the birds continued circling, the little black shapes became harder to discern against the darkening sky. The first stars blinked on around 9:10. Finally, I thought I had an idea where the birds were going, so I posted myself at the best vantage I could find. There! One at a time, birds were dropping from the wheeling flock, holding their stiff wings aloft, and floating like butterflies in an irregular path to their roost. By 9:16, the twittering fell silent as the last swift wafted down into the roost.

My next assignment? Convince the maintenance crew of a college dormitory to let me climb out onto the roof of their 11-story building and try to figure out where these little guys are roosting.

For more information about swifts, check here.

Here’s a letter from Richard Allison recently printed in the Sante Fe New Mexican:

July 13, 2008 in The Santa Fe New Mexican

I stayed close to home for the Fourth of July weekend. My wife and I spent a
very enjoyable weekend camping near Mills Canyon in Harding County. We did
it to save gasoline, as many others did. My thoughts, like those of many
others, centered on how we are going to get out of this high priced
crude-oil mess we have gotten ourselves into. I still want to travel and
visit family.

Most of my friends are sold on alternative energy supply as the key to
reducing our dependence on oil. These folks are no dummies, as they include
other engineers like me, teachers and researchers at the labs. Consistently,
they all say solar and wind power are the tickets to energy independence.
This seems to be the party line, as our governor and other leading
politicians in New Mexico are against any other form of power generation,
such as nuclear or coal. But what these excellent politicians are failing to
tell us is the whole truth.

I polled at least 10 friends last week, and only one had the right answer as
to the cost of wind generation, which is the power- generation alternative
of choice in New Mexico.

None of our politicians want to talk about the cost of wind- power
generation. Wind-power generation is one of the most expensive forms of
electric-power generation.

I am in favor of varied sources of power generation, but only after everyone
realizes what it is going to cost. The fact is that wind power is between 20
percent and 30 percent more costly than conventional power production. PNM
is right in the middle at a 25 percent premium. If you don’t believe me,
just look at the much- touted PNM Sky Blue program on its Web site.

The additional cost for signing up for this program is $.0169 per kilowatt
hour, or $1.69 per hundred kilowatt hours. This is 25 percent more than
their base rate. I am really not up to paying 25 percent more on my electric
bill because my ‘97 Honda still needs to be fed gasoline to get to work. My
energy dollar only goes so far.

The politicians are not telling us that wind power can never be used to base
load a power generation system. What happens when the wind does not blow,
which frequently happens for days at a time even in our windy New Mexico?
The base load generation must pick up the slack and this happens a lot.

So, unless we are willing, which I am not, to turn off the lights when the
wind does not blow, the base load generation must keep expanding. This is
where the cost gets exorbitant. For every dollar invested in a megawatt of
wind power generation, PNM must also have in reserve or under construction a
megawatt of base load capacity. In other words, PNM must spend the money to
build two power stations rather than one: the wind farm and coal/nuclear
base load plant. Both the wind power farms and base load generation must be
maintained, which again doubles the maintenance cost. PNM is also entitled
to a return on its investment, as it is a publicly held company that must
return a profit to the investors. If it were not for the tax incentives both
the state and federal governments give to wind generation, power companies
including PNM simply could not afford to build wind farms.

In the PNM system, the cheapest electrical generation is from the Palo Verde
Nuclear Plant in Arizona at a cost of $.0129 per kilowatt hour with more
than 90 percent availability, followed by the coal- fired plants in New
Mexico.

Based on the cost of generation, common sense leads us to more nuclear
plants as a way of keeping electrical costs low and a means of providing a
benefit of no emissions for those who are members of the climate
change/carbon reduction faith. If electric car technology comes on line in
the next 10 years, this could be our best choice for fueling our cars.

So the next time some of your friends or politicians start touting the
benefits of wind-power generation, ask them why they are in favor of such an
expensive power source. I am ready for more diverse power generation,
including nuclear and next-generation, clean-coal technology.

Richard Allison is a registered professional engineer currently working for
the New Mexico Department of Transportation. He lives in Santa Fe.

Another sad environmental disaster in the making was reported here today. Blue Crabs, this generation’s Chesapeake mainstay, are in a population tailspin thanks to water pollution in the Bay and overharvesting by watermen.

Again, as a society, we refuse to learn a lesson. Overharvesting destroyed the oyster stocks in the Chesapeake Bay, and they’ve never recovered. People sounded the alarm about Blue Crabs many years ago, and not enough was done. In fact, the same issues of declines in “submerged aquatic vegetation” that were discussed decades ago in reference to waterfowl populations are affecting crabs today.

If you’ve ever considered an environmentalist an “alarmist”, then this message is for you: listen to them and take heed! This is the kind of stuff they raise alarms about. (1) Population of something declines. (2) Scientists point out that human activities are the likely cause of the decline. (3) Activists take up the mantle to try to motivate society to fix the problem. (4) Society ignores activists. (5) Population declines continue; whatever economic features are linked to the species in question begin to suffer. (6) Industry collapses as resource base diminishes. (7) Society questions if there might be a problem.

We’re at stage 7 with Blue Crabs in the Chesapeake Bay. (We’re somewhere between 4 and 5 on global warming.)

Praise, congratulations, and thanks are to be bestowed on our neighbors to the north today, as Ontario has established an enormous preserve to protect boreal forests. Premiere Dalton McGuinty announced a commitment to protect 55 million acres (225,000 km2) of coniferous forest in northern Ontario. I don’t know yet what that “protection” really means, but it sounds pretty good!

To dig deeper on this story, be sure to check out Jeff Wells’ excellent Boreal Bird Blog.

Back on June 12th, I posted about a Carolina Wren nest in one of our hanging petunia baskets. On June 25th, one of the last things we did before leaving town was check the nest. We found a nestful of little wrens, just 2 or 3 days from fledging - and no cowbird.

The Great Auk was a large, flightless seabird from the North Atlantic that was hunted to extinction in 1844. The birds were easy to exploit from their remote nesting colonies, where sailors were said to sometimes simply herd the live birds up gangplanks and into their boats. The birds provided a source of fresh meat on long voyages, and were a welcome relief from hard tack. The large eggs were also collected for food, and auk down provided insulation. Once humans developed the ability to reliably sail to nesting colonies of Great Auks, the species was headed down the all-too-familiar path of exploitation that leads to extinction.

Their superficial resemblance to penguins is a wonderful example of convergent evolution, i.e., unrelated species developing through natural selection similar strategies to solve similar problems. In this case, both penguins (order Sphenisciformes) and auks or alcids (order Charadriiformes - this includes auks as well as terns, gulls, plovers, and sandpipers) have evolved the ability to swim rapidly and at depth in ocean water to pursue fish. Through convergent evolution, both groups have developed thick, torpedo-shaped bodies, dense plumage for warmth in cold climates, countershaded coloration (dark above and white below), and reduced wings that can assist in swimming by flapping underwater.

A closer look, however, reveals important differences. For example, auks possess clearly webbed feet, and these probably provide a good deal of propulsion during swimming. The heavy, club-like feet of penguins are generally not used during swimming, as propulsion comes mainly from the flipper-like wings. A penguin’s wings are in fact so modified as flippers for swimming, that they are stiff and bladelike, having lost the ability to fold against the body as do the wings of most other birds. Auk wings are different, in fact all 22 living species are able fliers while all penguins are flightless. Finally, these two groups of seabirds are separated geographically: all auks occur exclusively in the Northern Hemisphere (principally in the far north) and penguins are confined to the Southern (except of course, for the Galapagos Penguin, whose distribution straddles the Equator).

To further add to the confusion between penguins and auks, the word “penguin” is thought to derive from “pinioned” or “pin-winged”. When sailors first encountered the flightless Great Auk with its reduced wings, they described it as a bird who’d had its wings clipped to keep it from flying away. As more and more Europeans explored the southern oceans , they encountered there many black and white “pinioned” seabirds, and they referred to them as they did to the Great Auk - “penguins.” So penguins actually get that name from the history of sailors encountering the flightless Great Auk, and unrelated species from an entirely different hemisphere. Now you know.

But I digress . . .

The reason I’m posting about Great Auks today is that I encountered one recently. Well, sort of, but I was wrong.

While enjoying a great visit with old chum Greg Keller now at Gordon College in Massachusetts, Greg indicated that he had something really cool to show me - something he inherited as part of the College’s natural history collection.

He produced a leaded glass box containing several old eggs.

Only one, that of a Mute Swan, was labeled. The others were fairly easy to identify as ostrich, emu, and rhea, but the last two seemed a bit more interesting. One was not much larger than a chicken egg, and it had a buffy-olive color. Would an oologist from the 19th century have included the egg of a Rhode Island Red in a prized collection like this? It didn’t make sense. Then it hit me - tinamou! Tinamous are roughly chicken-sized and shaped birds from Central and South America that are most closely related to the rheas, ostriches, and emus. Tinamou eggs are beautifully glossy, and this would really have been a treasured specimen for an egg collector.

But the egg that really captured our attention was different. It was an obvious charadriiform egg, based on its pyriform shape and the pattern of uneven dark blotches on a light background. It was however, huge - almost as big as the emu egg in the box. Greg had done some background research based on his hunch that the egg in question was actually that of a Great Auk. All evidence pointed to that being the case. If authentic, this would be the rediscovery of a currently uncatalogued specimen of an extinct species, and a priceless find. It was a thrilling item to behold.

Emu egg (L) and Great Auk egg (R)

Alas, Greg finally had the chance to travel to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and direct comparison with known eggs confirmed his nagging suspicion that the Great Auk egg in his possession is, in fact, a well-crafted replica.

While our hopes of having encountered a piece of an extinct creature were dashed, I find myself perhaps even more interested in the mystery. Who made this egg, and why? Was there money to be had in producing egg forgeries during the height of the egg collection fad of the 19th century? Was this an honestly produced replica used for display while its authentic antecedent was kept in a more secure location? Had the original owner of the egg been the craftsman who produced it, or had he himself been duped into thinking it was authentic? Where one mystery ends, a new one begins . . .

On July 3rd, old pal and West Newbury resident Greg Keller and I invested a couple of hours birding Plum Island, MA. The area birders refer to as “Plum Island” is a complex of state, federal, and local management units, with most of the great birding concentrated at the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge.

As expected, we had a great day at Plum Island. I got to see Bobolinks, Willets, Seaside Sparrows, Salt Marsh Sharp-tailed Sparrows - all species I rarely get the chance to enjoy these days. We dipped out on King Rail, unfortunately, but we did well otherwise. Purple Martins were still hanging around their nests, but Tree and Barn swallows were amassing for their journey south. Willets were agitated, indicating that they had young in the vicinity - two of which we saw bobbing in the water in a pool with some ducks. Piping Plovers had several day old young out of the nest, and the adults were giving them a good bit of freedom.

The best find of the day, however, was a flyby Ruff. (more…)

From overhunting and egg collecting, through the atrocities of the millinery trade and the unintended long-term consequences of DDT, from the introduction of exotic invasive species to nesting sites formerly free of predators and loss of critical nesting habitat from coastal development and the operation of off-road vehicles, from oil spills and inshore water pollution and overfishing, and on through the effects of changing ocean currents and rising sea levels . . .

coastal seabirds are in long-term population decline.

Some of the best studied mixed species colonies in Scotland are apparently in the midst of 15 years of poor reproductive success and colony abandonment. Traditional breeding sites that formerly supported thousands of pairs of various species are now just shadows of their former glory, or have been abandoned altogether. If this was just a Scottish problem it’d be bad enough, but stories like this have been the norm from different regions of the globe for many years. While many seabirds benefit from relatively long lifespans (> 15 years) and populations can generally withstand a few bad years in a row, 15 bad years indicates that something unusual is happening.