Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2016 i Audubon Magazine

Photographing wildlife is Robert Clark’s passion, but he doesn’t exactly approach it like most other artists do. In his book Feathers: Displays of Brilliant Plumage, Clark blows out the elaborate shapes, textures, and colors that cover 180 species of birds and their ancestors. Though his subjects look vibrant, they come from taxidermy and fossil collections from around the world. It’s a detail that pairs well with Clark’s mission: to provide a deep study into how form meets function on the microscopic surface of a feather. Read on to learn the stories behind six of his models. _Purbita Saha THE SARTORIALISTS GREAT ARGUS AND SUPERB LYREBIRD Every feather is an evolutionary mystery. The male Great Argus, for example, hides a dazzling array of patterns beneath its drab wings. When it wants…

—David Holmes After reading the woeful tale of the harming of birds and other animals (along with carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere) by companies harvesting palm oil, I began checking my kitchen for items with palm and palm kernel oil. I was truly surprised by how many were there. From this time forward, I will be checking scorecards for the food companies involved in this business and baking from scratch rather than buying convenience foods and other items containing palm oil. CINDY BECK MARION, IN Classic Twist [RE: “The Illustrated Aviary: California Condor”] Generally your end-of-the-book “reimaginations” of John James Audubon’s bird portraits have shown the artists’ self-generated notions of “art” far more than they have revealed anything of interest about the birds themselves. Granted, Audubon’s own approach to…

IN A BIND By mid-October, most birds have departed Grassholm, the world’s fourth-largest Northern Gannet colony, for wintering grounds. Many of the stragglers can’t leave because they’re tethered to their nests by fishing line and other plastic debris. To save the captives from starvation, each fall Greg Morgan, a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds warden, and his volunteer crew motor out to the nine-hectare island located eight miles off Wales. “The smell hits you before you even land,” Morgan says. “Thirty-six thousand pairs of seabirds equals a lot of guano.” Grassholm, which is off-limits to the public, has no dock, so the rescuers’ aluminum-hulled boat lurches in tempestuous waters as they disembark onto slippery rocks. Once ashore they pass through the colony, cutting loose gannets like this one…

BIRDLIFE DIVERSITY IS HIGHEST IN THE tropics, and world travelers determined to see a lot of bird species might spend months in equatorial regions of Asia, Africa, and South America. But even if your time is limited, you can find a wealth of beautiful and exotic birds just a short plane flight south from major U.S. cities. Prime birding sites in the nearby tropics offer perfect escapes from winter weather and the chance to add dozens—or even hundreds—of tropical birds to your life list. —Kenn Kaufman Grail Bird Resplendent Quetzal Glowing emerald and scarlet with long, flowing plumes, the male quetzal seems too ornate to be a real bird. The typically elusive birds are somewhat easier to locate in their highland cloud forest homes in late winter, when males become…

The most biodiverse park on the planet can be a very noisy place—especially around sunset, when day-shift creatures cede the rainforest to those who roam and serenade the night. But on a late afternoon in April, the trails near Yasuní National Park’s Yasuní Scientific Station are jarringly quiet. In a half day of hiking the muddy trails near the station, we see a few lizards and snakes, and a fast-moving troop of squirrel monkeys, but only a handful of the 610 bird species that have been catalogued within the park’s borders. “Only a few years ago, the wildlife here was amazing,” says my hiking partner, Ecuadorian biologist and nature photographer Rubén D. Jarrín. But new roads and oil pipelines keep cutting deeper into this fragile wonderland, disrupting the movements and…

The first thing captain kenny mccain noticed at Seahorse Key was that something was wrong with the sky. It was a drizzly morning in April 2015, the first break in a freak spring squall that had lashed Florida’s Gulf Coast for two days. Captain Kenny, as he’s known around Cedar Key, the Big Bend fishing town where his family has lived for seven generations, had motored his skiff three miles to the outermost island of the Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuge. He was planning to check on the facilities of the Seahorse Key Marine Laboratory, to see how the University of Florida research station had weathered the storm. Captain Kenny knows the island better than most. After 24 years as an officer of the refuge, he left the U.S. Fish…

FIELD WORK The Owl and the Photographer Paul Bannick has spent tens of thousands of hours in the field, photographing owls during their every life stage, for his new book, Owl: A Year in the Lives of North American Owls. Over time his technique has changed: The more he’s shot, the more distance he’s put between him and his subject. And that’s made his photography better, he says, because it enables him to capture more behavior and integrate more of the bird’s environment. Bannick points out that every one of the 19 owls in North America is an indicator species and that if we pay attention, they will tell us about their habitat and the other animals that share it. “When we see owls in the winter, to me they’re…

YOU ARE WHAT HOPE LOOKS like to a bird. Audubon’s members have known that for 110 years, but this modern Audubon is bringing an unprecedented torrent of energy to the most significant opportunities to protect birds and the places they need. A Ruby-throated Hummingbird that weighs less than a quartermigrates across the 500 miles of the Gulf of Mexico, losing half its body weight; Arctic Terns log as many as 60,000 miles a year; endangered Whooping Crane parents will lead their young 2,300 miles from their breeding grounds in central Canada to the Gulf Coast of Texas—and back. Every one of these amazing birds is a window into ecosystems that we’re committed to preserving. But none of those birds can vote, none can write a check. They rely on us.…

IN LATE SEPTEMBER GEOFF McQuilkin knelt on the gray alkali crust on the shore of Mono Lake, scowling at an image of a coyote caught by a camera trap. The stealthy predator was dangerously close to the lake’s volcanic isles, which host one of the largest California Gull rookeries in the world. Most years the mile-wide moat between the shoreline and the atolls is enough to keep the birds safe. Yet five consecutive drought years and an arid El Niño have left this ancient sea on the eastern edge of Yosemite National Park at its lowest level in two decades. If the water drops another foot (a likely outcome over the next season) it threatens to expose multiple landbridges, putting the eggs and chicks of roughly 45,000 nesting California Gulls…

BINOCULARS ARE AN ESSENTIAL TOOL FOR BIRDERS, but with so many models on the market, it can be daunting to find the perfect pair. So we turned to professional ornithologists and dedicated birders. In August, attendees at the North American Ornithological Conference and members of the Brooklyn Bird Club sacrificed leisurely breakfasts, lunch breaks, and cocktail hours to test more than 30 pairs of binoculars from 11 companies under a variety of conditions. For the sake of consistency, all the optics reviewed have 8x magnification. Our small army of volunteers rated the models on a 1-to-5 scale for a variety of factors, including clarity, brightness, focus response, and eye relief (for an explanation of our survey methods and the full results, visit audubon.org/binoculars). While choosing a pair of binoculars ultimately…