Innholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2015 i Audubon Magazine

SOUTH WALTON BECKONS birders with its welcoming chain of 16 beach neighborhoods and unique architecture strung along 26 miles of sugar-white sand beaches, unspoiled dunes, rare coastal lakes and endless opportunities to explore. The Timpoochee Trail, a 19-mile paved multiuse trail named for 19th century Euchee Chief Sam Story, connects these communities and many of the area’s favorite parks. All three state beach parks can be accessed from the trail, and two of them are among several Walton County sites on the Great Florida Birding Trail. Topsail Hill Preserve State Park provides inland hiking trails through scrub and coastal lakes with opportunities for Eastern Kingbirds, Red-headed Woodpeckers and Brown-headed Nuthatches. Sandwich, Least and Royal Terns loaf on the beach and Snowy Plovers nest here. Scan the surf for Common Loons,…

PENSACOLA BEACH is celebrated for its gleaming sand and thousands of wintering shorebirds. You’ll receive a first-rate introduction to the ecology of this fragile coastline during a visit to the Pensacola Beach Eco Trail with its interpretive displays covering local plants, shells, beach ecology and wildlife including sea turtles, dolphins, fish, and birds. Spend a day or maybe three at Fort Pickens in Gulf Islands National Seashore. The beach supplies prime hunting for migrating raptors in October and April as well as critical nesting habitat for Snowy Plovers and Least Terns through the fall. Sweep the fort and surrounding trails for migrating warblers, particularly in early afternoon or after a storm. visitpensacolabeach.com/eco-trail…

LAST MARCH, WHEN CYCLONE Pam hit the tiny nation of Tuvalu, a string of low-lying coral islands in the South Pacific, it brought bodies with it. As the tide surged across a cemetery on the atoll of Nui, it roiled the ground, unearthing corpses and washing them into the streets. The Category 5 storm displaced Nui’s living residents, too. When the water receded, they returned to their homes, gathered the bones and skulls they could find, and reburied their dead. Six months after the storm and 7,500 miles away, Tafue Lusama, the General Secretary of the Christian Church of Tuvalu, described the scene to an audience gathered at Union Theological Seminary, in Manhattan. Clicking through slides on a Power-Point presentation, he spoke about the ways climate change is altering the…

AT 17 MILLION ACRES, southeastern Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is the largest forest in the United States, and one of just a handful of relatively intact temperate rainforests left in the world. Its rare old-growth stands of cedar, spruce, and hemlock not only provide irreplaceable habitat for dozens of species of birds—including Marbled Murrelets and the world’s largest concentration of Bald Eagles—they also serve as a globally significant carbon sink, storing nearly 10 times more carbon than any other U.S. national forest. During the past half-century the timber industry has eaten away at the Tongass, to the alarm of conservationists who have fought to end old-growth logging; this summer, after years of litigation, a federal court granted the greens a victory by closing off more than half the forest to…

In the spring of last year, a Peregrine Falcon began visiting Dacey Arashiba’s condo balcony in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Counting himself lucky, he began documenting the bird with photos and video, and he happened to be filming on April 3 when a second peregrine swooped in. “Holy crap!” Arashiba exclaims on the tape, “there are two of you?” There were indeed— a pair looking to procreate. Apparently, the 28th-floor flower box was the perfect love nest. (“I hadn’t replenished the dirt in a few years,” admits Arashiba, an IT consultant who moonlights as a comedian and singer.) A delighted Arashiba named the birds Linda and Steve after the classic Perry rockers, the (unrelated) lead singers for 4 Non Blondes and Journey, respectively, and so began a chatty, weeks-long human–raptor cohabitation.…

POLK COUNTY’S long history with cattle ranching has spawned some exceptional inland birding opportunities. Circle B Bar Reserve, a former cattle ranch near Lakeland, furnishes a mix of habitats from freshwater marshes and swamps to upland oak hammocks perfect for spotting a variety of birds on one site. Scan lakes and marshes for Mottled Ducks, Black-bellied Whistling-ducks, and teal, as well as shorebirds in the winter and long-legged wading species all year. Ospreys and Bald Eagles are common over open water. Eastern Meadowlarks and various wintering sparrows frequent old pastures. Explore four miles of trails on foot or take the entrance road to bird by car. Visit Lake Kissimmee State Park for a helping of exceptional beauty to go with Crested Caracaras and Florida Scrub-jays. Work your way through a…

ON A THURSDAY AFTER-noon in late September, a group of high school boys gingerly worked dogwood saplings and eastern bluestar shrubs out of plastic containers and placed them in an oval-shaped patch of soil on the campus of the Glen Mills School, outside Philadelphia. Glen Mills isn’t an ordinary high school: It’s an alternative to juvenile detention for teenaged boys who have had run-ins with the law—petty theft, assault, and everything in between. It’s also home to the region’s largest Purple Martin colony, where up to 700 birds nest each year. When the martins return to campus next spring, they’ll find a new rain garden awaiting them. The garden is one of several projects that came to fruition after the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, the Chester Ridley…

Birds get sick. Just like us, they are prone to diseases and parasites, from pathogens that lurk in their blood to insects that feed on it. In some cases, these organisms and their hosts exist in relative harmony, particularly those that co-evolved over millennia. But when birds are hit with an entirely new-to-them bug—often a nonnative species, or the result of one—their immune systems aren’t always prepared for the attack. New illnesses are especially dangerous for birds already fighting for survival, such as endangered species or populations facing the potentially negative effects of climate change. From there it’s a race against time for birds to adapt, perhaps by evolving a new immune response that helps ward off the illness or by adopting a behavior that helps them avoid infection to…

AS A KOREAN KID GROWING UP THE ’60s in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the son of immigrant parents, James Yang always liked to draw. Back then he took a realistic approach to the American Goldfinch he sketched for a school report, careful to replicate its bright-yellow plumage, black cap, and whiteedged wings. But as he developed as an artist, he adopted a stripped-down and simplified style. “It’s sort of my way of misremembering the world,” he says. “I deconstruct things and build them back in a way that makes sense to me.” As the starting point for his interpretation of Audubon’s drawing of Wild Turkeys, Yang broke the birds down into geometric shapes and focused on the mother’s relationship with her chicks—“that’s what the art is really about,” he says. Then…

WHEN THE U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE RECENTLY made a major announcement about its decision not to list the Greater Sage-Grouse under the Endangered Species Act, Audubon’s Brian Rutledge was the only representative from a national conservation organization on the stage with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. That’s because Brian pioneered the win-win formula that will lock in new protective management plans on 60 million acres of public land across the West. That decision is a vivid example of Audubon’s role as a centrist, solutions-oriented conservation organization. For 10 years Audubon has been taking the difficult path—generating and defending credible science and securing real cooperation from industry and ranchers and the widest range of partners. As a result of unprecedented collaboration between conservation groups, industry, ranchers, state governments, and federal agencies,…

THIS YEAR’S kickoff keynote speaker is Dr. Stephen Kress, Vice President for Bird Conservation for the National Audubon Society, Director of the Audubon Seabird Restoration Program and Director of the Hog Island Audubon Camp, who will set the tone for five days of amazing classroom and in-thefield wildlife experiences during a premier time of the year to be in Florida. Many birders may know Dr. Kress as director of the iconic Project Puffin, a program he founded in the early 1970s in an effort to restore puffins to their historic breeding grounds in the Gulf of Maine on Eastern Egg Rock, where they had been eliminated by hunting some 100 years before. Between 1973 and 1986, more than 900 puffin chicks were fledged by researchers on Egg Rock with the…

VISIT THE Okaloosa Island area of the Gulf Islands National Seashore for relaxed beach birding and walking along a pristine shoreline. Waterfowl are abundant in the winter, while the beach provides amazing opportunities to see migratory and wintering species. Don’t miss the Great Blue Heron colony at Veterans Park at Baywalk and an influx of migrating warblers and rarities in the fall and spring. Good bets here are Purple Gallinules, Sora, Yellow-billed Cuckoos and White-eyed Vireos. Comb the forest edge of one of this region’s many bayous at Fred Gannon Rocky Bayou State Park. Ospreys nest nearby, while a walk along one of the park’s nature trails may give you a glimpse of breeding Prothonotary and Blackand-white Warblers as well as Indigo Buntings and vireos during migration. With these and…

IN 2012, WHEN AUDUBON scientists Matt Jeffery and Walker Golder discovered hundreds of Piping Plovers wintering at Joulter Cays, a smattering of remote, uninhabited islands in the Bahamas, it was something of a coup. Worldwide, the Piping Plover is a near-threatened species (the global population is estimated at just 8,000 breeding birds), and any new knowledge about its winter hideout would offer a fresh opportunity for protection. But once the exhilaration of the discovery wore off, Jeffery and Golder were faced with a question: What next? The two shorebird experts knew they had to find a way to guard Joulter’s plovers— sand mining, overfishing, and pollution all pose big threats to the local ecology. The answer, they decided, was to persuade the Bahamian government to designate the area as a…

TIEDUN DAO, A TINY, barren island off the coast of eastern China, isn’t the sort of place you’d want to be during a typhoon—the island doesn’t have so much as a shack for shelter. But in the summer of 2014, when Simba Chan found himself on Tiedun Dao as a storm bore down, he couldn’t bring himself to leave. Chan, a senior conservation officer with BirdLife International, had important charges to protect: a newly established colony of critically endangered Chinese Crested Terns. For more than 40 years the Chinese Crested Tern was believed to be extinct, a victim of rampant egg poaching. Then, in the early 2000s, two small colonies were discovered. “This was like rediscovering the Ivory-billed Woodpecker,” says Steve Kress, Audubon’s vice president for bird conservation, who in…