Sounds of the times

As we move from winter to spring and summer, the trees and bushes start up their photosynthesis machinery again. While great at providing shade for the tired birder, leaves are also super at hiding everything we want to see! At our recent Birding101 outings and Field Trips, we’ve been talking about the benefits of birding by ear.

Red-eyed Vireo mid-song.

RBAS Spring Challenge 2015!

All right! It's time for another RBAS Challenge! What we want to do with this challenge is encourage birding right in your backyard and report your sightings to Ebird.

In case you don't know, Ebird.org is a citizen science data entry platform that aggregates bird sightings from all over the world and makes them available to anyone and everyone that's interested in learning about bird distribution, recent sightings in a particular place, or historical trends. All of this data allows researchers at Ebird make a Migration Forecast- a resource that combines our submissions to Ebird with weather forecasts to predict which species will be where, when they'll be there, and if there's going to be bad flying (good birding) conditions.

They can also compile all of this sightings data and make some really awesome migration maps! Here's one for the Indigo Bunting. Very cool!

To better attract birds to your backyard, we've set up a resource for you. Some of the basics of backyard feeders and yard set up are discussed, as well as the benefits for planting native plants. We've linked out to a lot of other resources as there is a lot of information available on this topic!


The Challenge

Our Spring 2015 Challenge is to submit at least 10 Ebird lists from your backyard before 01May2015. This gives you 6 weeks to get 10 lists! Easy! If you don't have a backyard, pick a favorite park or neighborhood spot and see what you can find.

For everyone that completes the Challenge, your name will be entered into a raffle to be held at the 13May RBAS Meeting. Prizes will include guide books, bird feeders, and whatever other items we can conjure up. We're expecting to have around 20 prizes, so lots of people will walk out of there with something!

Once you've gotten your 10 Ebird lists in, REGISTER for the drawing!


Ebird

For a quick how-to-Ebird, I've made an instructional video covering the basics for setting up an account and submitting a list. Ebird.org a free site- no cost you the citizen scientists- it is sponsored by National Audubon and Cornell Lab of Ornithology! So get reporting!

Spring Shakedown 2014

Well, the calendar has turned, and we’re officially out of the spring migration season and into the summer breeding season. Of course, setting hard and fast calendar dates to define biology is really just for the fun of organizing things… birds have been on nests for sometime now, and I’m sure there are still migrants passing through the area.

But with the changing of the calendar, we certainly know what we can expect: fewer warblers to crane our necks at, fewer shorebirds to become flummoxed over, and more leaves to peer through something small and backlit singing it’s head off in the canopy. I started thinking about this year’s migration season, and how it might have compared to years past. Particularly last year- as these two migrations couldn’t have felt more different.

Maybe it was the numbers of birds we got to see as a group, maybe it was the excitement of the fall-outs, or maybe it was some other enigmatic or abstruse reason known only to the moon and stars. This year felt thin, like we weren’t seeing the warblers and tanagers we did last year. Certainly last year we were spoiled rotten, but this year seemed very lean, with just a few individuals at Brison or County Club Lake at a time. If they were even there!

Whatever the reason, I wanted to look at some data. Numbers always soothe my mind- or at least confound it. And sometimes I can glean little nuggets of interest for extra perspective. This year continued our recovery from the drought of 2010–11, the rainfall kept the lakes in town pretty full.

Look at the drop in rain in 2010 AND 2011! Bad times.

Migrating through the big picture

As exciting and memorable as spring migration is, it’s safe to say that much of what defines a “successful” migration for birding comes down to seeing just a handful of individuals during the month or two that they pass through the area. Of the numerous highlights Sarah and I had last year, one sighting in particular that was especially thrilling: a Cerulian Warbler at Washington-on-the-Brazos State Park. One bird. One individual. ONE! That’s all it takes to make the month, season, year and life (etc etc etc) lists.

Looking back over my list from last spring, there were several birds like this- Yellow-bellied Flycatcher, Black-headed Grosbeak, Blue-winged Warbler, and Blackpoll Warbler. There were others where I saw so many that they became unremarkable, like Chestnut-sided Warblers, Nashville Warblers or Black-throated Green Warblers. Not that these birds aren’t beautiful and exciting to see, but they became regulars on our daily or weekly excursions.

But neither of these cases really capture what’s going on, does it? I say that Chestnut-sideds were common, but our Ebird data says we saw 28 birds. Nashvilles? 49. Black-throated greens? 24. That’s still not really anything when it comes to the birds that passed through the area. We surely don’t see every last on of them! And it doesn’t even start to describe the population! It’s really quite a challenge to get your mind around what’s really going on with this spring migration: tens (hundreds?) of millions of individuals across 500+ species moving north all in the span of 2-3 months.