Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2021 i Audubon Magazine

Birds still put most high-tech flying machines to shame, especially in turbulent air. In flight, birds dramatically change their wing shapes, tucking to fly fast, spreading during a glide, or making sharp twists and turns. “This enables them to fly more efficiently, fly longer, and maneuver better,– says Stanford University mechanical engineer David Lentink. To that end, he and his team studied the wing feathers of the ever-agile Rock Pigeon, and in early 2020, shared news of their most birdlike flying robot to date. The simple remote-controlled PigeonBot deftly maneuvers in the wind by rapidly adjusting its “wings.” But it is not capable of flapping. Consider that another reason to love the underappreciated pigeon.…

IMAGINE A SINGLE BIRD DURING A SPRING dusk moments before flight. Maybe an Upland Sandpiper standing on the vast Argentine pampas, ready to launch itself on an 8,000-mile trek to its breeding grounds on Alaska’s upland tundra. Or a Blackpoll Warbler in an orange grove in Colombia, set to make a 6,000-mile journey to Canada’s boreal forest. Or a Yellow-billed Cuckoo leaving the Bolivian plains, bound for the deciduous woodlands of Illinois, some 4,000 miles away. Or a Bobolink, a Scarlet Tanager, a Wilson’s Warbler … Tonight, conditions seem right. The way ingrained inside. The script passed down for millennia. The birds will flow through the sky, a living river rolling through darkness, skirting storms and artificial light and a minefield of inhospitable landscapes below. Zoom in: That single bird…

Habitat: Males and females use habitat differently even at the same site. Bobolinks (above) nest on the ground in tallgrass meadows. Males often perch up high as they belt out bubbling songs, while females sit lower in the vegetation at a middling height, making them easy to miss. Song: In North America, females of more than 140 species are known to sing. Wrentits (top left), heard more than seen, sing chattering songs to defend territory. Listen closely to tell the sexes apart. A series of bouncing peeps ending in an accelerating trill is a male Wrentit. If the trill does not get faster, she’s a female. Migration: Males typically migrate earlier than females, scout territories, and cede most parenting duties. The Spotted Sandpiper, however, switches it up. Females arrive first…

The female Red-winged Blackbird isn’t black, nor does she have noticeably red wings. She looks like an overgrown sparrow, which is why this female stumps new and experienced birders time and again. But the more you observe her, the more charismatic she becomes. The female Red-winged Blackbird sports some color: She has a peachy or rusty hue on her face and a matching wing patch subtler than the male’s. She also has a unique call: a rapid, sputtery outburst that rivals a male’s song in volume. Pay attention, too, to her beak, which is longer and more conical than a sparrow’s thick, triangular bill. Redwinged Blackbirds are easy to spot in parks and open areas during nest-building season, often seen carrying dried grasses to a hidden spot in a marsh.…

WHEN I MOVED TO MAINE from New York City last year, I was excited by the idea of getting closer to nature. A vast expanse of ocean surrounded my new hometown; hundreds of mountain hikes were just a short drive away. Only, when driving to the trailhead last November, I passed a giant sign made of three bedsheets strung between trees. “Keep America Great,” it proclaimed in red spray paint. A sign on the side of another house, 10 minutes from our destination, yelled: “Build the Wall.” I was suddenly aware of the fact that I was an Indian man in the whitest state in America. I grew nervous about stopping, and I didn’t relax until my partner and I met our friends and their large dog, the entrance to…

Speak up. People from privileged groups are often more comfortable ignoring discrimination than confronting it—even when it affects their friends. “Acknowledgment is important,” Thomas says. Do the work. Stereotypes can be undone by examining their roots. “If I’m not going to talk to a white person who says a problematic thing, who is?” says Ava Holliday, of the Avarna Group, who is white. “It’s not the responsibility of folks of color.” Don’t gatekeep. If you find yourself or others in your group questioning someone’s motives or outdoor skills, put aside those assumptions to make space for everyone, says Color Outside founder Nailah Blades Wylie.…

Build a Community: Respond to followers in comments and ask questions. For example, post a photo of your spark bird and ask others to share a story about theirs. Use a platform’s built-in tools, such as polls and stories, to interact. Caption with Finesse: Whether you show your humor with a bird pun, share fun facts about a behavior, or tell the story behind your shot, be creative and let your personality shine in your posts. Consider using the space to educate people about the environmental and conservation issues that affect a pictured bird or its habitat. Use Hashtags: Expand your reach with hashtags like #bird and #birdphotography, which have millions of posts behind them on most platforms, but you don’t have to stop there. Find niche hashtags, such as…

1 Post a photo, video, or audio clip in the Facebook group “What’s This Bird?”—run by the American Birding Association—and some of its 52,000 members will try to help with an identification. 2 #BirdTwitter not only celebrates great photos, it hails terrible ones, too. Use the hashtag #Worst-BirdPic, which was started by @TheIneptBirder, to seek a round of applause for your most impressive photography fails. 3 Social media would be pretty boring without funny photodriven memes. Find inspiration for creating your own by joining the moderated Facebook group “Birding Memes.”…

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON DIDN’T start this magazine. He didn’t even live to know about the organization that publishes it. But he was the inspiration for a whole movement of Audubons, including the National Audubon Society and its hundreds of affiliated chapters, dedicated to appreciating and protecting birds—not to mention countless nature centers, schools, towns, and at least one zoo, state park, and national wildlife refuge. Audubon’s influence as a naturalist and illustrator of 19th-centurybirdlife is far-reaching. The beauty of his art, as J. Drew Lanham writes in “What Do We Do About John James Audubon?” (page 28), is unparalleled even today. That’s one reason why we ask artists to reimagine plates from Birds of America for our Illustrated Aviary page—incorporating Audubon into not just our name but also the magazine’s…

FOR NEARLY FOUR DECADES THE Blackfeet Nation has fought off attempts to drill for oil and gas in Montana’s Badger-Two Medicine area. Nestled in a national forest beside Glacier National Park, the region’s sweeping valleys, rivers, and wetlands—almost entirely unmarred by roads—form the setting of the Blackfeet creation story and host tribal ceremonies today. After winning the latest battle last June, when a federal court threw out the industry’s remaining lease there, the tribe now seeks more enduring protections. Its leaders worked with U.S. Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) to introduce a bill in July that would permanently conserve nearly 130,000 acres. A new “cultural heritage area” designation would also give the Blackfeet more say in how it’s cared for. “We have our own ethical way of working with the land,”…

Eighty percent of North America’s migratory birds travel by night, and artificial light complicates their already daunting trek. Illuminated buildings and bright anthropogenic skyglow disorient birds, causing some to collide with structures, while others circle in confusion until sunrise. Last fall Audubon’s Lights Out program launched a new partnership with the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA). Audubon’s Bird-friendly Buildings program manager, Connie Sanchez, says the collaboration combines IDA’s light pollution technical expertise with Audubon’s migration knowledge, and both groups’ extensive networks of chapters. Together the organizations aim to reduce artificial light pollution—which will help ensure birds’ safe passage between nesting and wintering grounds, while also benefiting humans and other wildlife. Sanchez says, “It’s about what we can do together to minimize impacts and protect the night sky.” BE PART OF THE…

In May 2019 a group of birders calling ourselves the Galbatrosses traveled to Cape May County, New Jersey, to compete in the World Series of Birding. But instead of tallying as many species as we could, like other teams did, we chose to count only females. That decision changed the way we bird forever. Looking for females became a habit, then a calling. We’re better birders for it, more attuned to birds’ behavior and habitat use. COVID-19 scuttled our plans for a 2020 World Series run, so we created new ways to champion our cause. In late spring join us for Female Bird Day by posting your female bird sightings on Twitter under #GalbatrossProject and #FemaleBirdDay. We’ll also be judging the Female Bird Prize, new to the 2021 Audubon Photography…

BILL STRIPING Species: Piping Plover Pointer: During the breeding season, male and female Piping Plovers both sport black-and-orange bills. However, the boundary between black and orange is blurry and faded for females and sharply delineated for males: The latter look like they had their bills dipped in ink. EYE FLECK Species: American and Black Oystercatchers Pointer: Some oystercatchers have dark flecks in their bright yellow irises, giving the pupil an elongated look. It turns out that, according to genetic analysis, those flecks are a sex-linked trait found only in female birds. Why? Scientists don’t know. BILL BASE Species: European Starling Pointer: Male and female starlings look alike—except for their bill base. This mark requires brute force: Look at breeding adults until you find one with pink at the base of…

Birds of the World features encyclopedic accounts of species written by scientists and citing studies. The entries are helpfully divided into sections like appearance, behavior, and sound (birdsoftheworld.org, $49 per year). Identification Guide to North American Birds by Peter Pyle is the bird bander’s sacred text. The extremely technical two-volume set brims with details useful for female birding (Avinet.com, $52 per volume). Google Scholar indexes literature across the sciences. Search for a species name to dig up unusual descriptions that didn’t make it into your field guide. Tip: Email the study author for a copy of the paper (scholar.google.com).…

USE YOUR CAMERA If someone threatens you, hit record—especially if they are verbally or physically assaulting you, advises Leah Thomas, founder of Intersectional Environmentalist. When Black birder Christian Cooper recorded his encounter with Amy Cooper in Central Park last year, the video was proof of racial profiling. It also showed that he did not attack her, as she claimed in a false 911 call. “Sometimes people just don’t believe people of color,” says Thomas. If you can create one safely, a recording makes it difficult to dismiss your concerns. TRUST YOUR GUT Fear is your body’s survival instinct—if you’re feeling it, it may well be coming from a valid place. “If you get any sort of inclination that something’s not safe, trust your gut,” says Perry Cohen, founder of Venture…

With great power comes great responsibility. Your photos can be shared by anyone—even thousands of people. Could a crush of visitors damage an uncommon bird in your area, a sensitive species (such as an owl or a nesting bird), a delicate ecosystem (such as rare wildflowers or sand dunes), or the property of homeowners a bird is visiting? If yes, consider delaying a post to social media (and eBird) for a few weeks, don’t use geo-tags, and strip the EXIF data from the file itself (some sites do the last automatically). Be vague enough in a caption that the exact location would be hard to find. Also think about the message sent by any photo. Is it promoting respect for natural spaces? Some people attract followers by pushing limits and…

ONE AUTUMN DAY HALFWAY through the 20th century, a Laysan Albatross returned to Midway Atoll, built a nest in the sand, and settled in to incubate her annual egg. A firm believer in “nestsite fidelity,” the albatross had made this same trip most autumns of her adult life—doing the work of countless generations of albatrosses before her. Each year millions of seabirds return to this tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to breed. And over the centuries, the generations of humans who watch these seabirds have given them myriad names: mōlī, a nod to the tattooing needles that native Hawaiians once crafted with the birds’ bones; albatross, derived from an Arabic term for “diver”; Laysan, after an even smaller neighboring island that, in turn, was named for…

It’s not only birders who tend to ignore female birds: Scientists do, too. They assume females are present wherever males are, but often that’s not true. For example, female Golden-winged Warblers spend winter at lower elevations than males—and those areas face greater deforestation. Only 8 percent of North American migratory bird management plans consider how the sexes differ in habitat use, according to one study. That needs to change. Females drive species’ reproduction and must be considered for successful conservation.…

A FAMILIAR LAUGH RESOUNDS across the park, which I instantly know is a Pileated Woodpecker. But today is Female Bird Day, so I need to get closer to see the bird’s cheekbones. I track it to a dead beech tree and aim my binoculars. Rats—a red mustache makes it an adult male. I move on. The afternoon breezes by as I tally female sparrows and swallows. Spring plumage makes some species easy to sex; others require closer study. I notice an Eastern Kingbird rounding up twigs as if they were insects and look up the behavior online. Score: nest-building is a female’s job. By the day’s end, I had identified a dozen species as females. None are especially rare, but I surprise myself by not caring. The female-centric take on…

As two recent incidents revealed, birding sanctuaries don’t necessarily offer refuge to everyone keen to experience them. In August 2020 six teenage girls in a foster care program and four chaperones, all of whom are Black, visited Constitution Marsh Audubon Center and Sanctuary (right) in Putnam County, New York. In the parking area, local residents yelled racist and xenophobic slurs and blocked the group’s access to the trailhead. Two months later, New Hampshire Audubon staff found stickers bearing white supremacist, racist, and anti-Semitic messages on trail signs at the Silk Farm Sanctuary in Concord. They quickly removed them, but the stickers reminded Doug Bechtel, the group’s president, that conservation can often be all too white. New Hampshire Audubon condemned the show of hatred and is increasing programming designed for diverse…

It took a nudge from the young birders she mentors in British Columbia for Melissa Hafting (@bcbirdergirl) to join the photo-centric platform Instagram in 2018. She has since built a following of more than 6,000 while posting images, such as a “noisy, gawdy” Steller’s Jay (top), from local trips and global expeditions. She suggests using Instagram Stories, where she shares friendly shoutouts, conservation updates, and more, to help “your audience gauge who you are and what you are about.” Since 2014, after seeing a big reaction to a livestream of a Laysan Albatross family, Kaua`i Albatross Network founder Hob Osterlund has used the power of visual storytelling on Facebook to provoke passionate discussion. Her fans sometimes project human connections and emotions in the many bird photos she posts, such as…

GROWING UP, PAULO ORDOVEZA ENJOYED DEBUNKING URBAN legends circulating on email. Now as @PicPedant he patrols Twitter to call out misleading, Photoshopped, and stolen photos, with an eye for nature and wildlife images. For example, these toy owls were first posted on a craftmaker’s blog, but he spotted them shared by a spam account as real animals. A birder wouldn’t buy it, but many do, and that’s bad for legitimate photographers—and legitimate birds. In general, he advises, if a photo seems too good to be true, it may be staged. Consider the emotions a post is seeking to evoke: Is it doing so in a manipulative way? Before sharing an out-of-context photo on your feed, dig deeper. If an account doesn’t say who runs it or credit a source, be…