Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2023 i Audubon Magazine

Camouflaged, nocturnal, and elusive, nightjars are some of the least-studied birds on the continent. Surveys suggest that many species in the family, including the Eastern Whip-poor-will, are in sharp decline, and researchers in the Midwest want to uncover what’s driving the losses. Mike Ward, a University of Illinois ornithologist, is helping lead the charge. To better understand what the whip-poor-wills need to survive, for the past five years his team has surveyed Sand Ridge State Forest in central Illinois, one of the few known places where the species continues to thrive in the state. “There are still enough out there that if we figure out what’s going on,” Ward says, “we can probably turn around that trend pretty quickly if we do the right thing.”…

Unseen Danger Each year, up to a billion migrating birds are killed across North America after colliding with buildings and windows along their journeys. To document this tragedy and solutions that can help prevent it, this past spring our team embedded for a day with volunteers and organizations who tirelessly work to rescue injured migrants across Manhattan—one of the country’s most dangerous gauntlets. Because of the influx of young birds making their first-ever migrations, the fall season is especially hazardous and deadly. To read our account and learn how to save an injured bird yourself, visit audubon.org/birdstrikes. RE: “Fieldwork for All” Jenny McKee’s feature story about the safety inequities faced by women, LGBTQIA++, and BIPOC scientists working in the field was illuminating for readers while resonating with many in the…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, A DOZEN volunteers and staff armed with trowels kicked off an urgent experiment in cactus conservation. On a clear March morning they spread out within the high-quality habitat of the Tucson Audubon’s Mason Center, pushing wheelbarrows loaded with three-to six-inch cacti. By noon, they had planted 130 saguaros near ironwood, mesquite, and palo verde “nurse trees,” which provide shade and boost the baby cacti’s chances of survival. If the succulents take root, they have a long way to grow. They won’t start flowering until they are 35 to 70 years old, and it can take up to 100 years for their first branching arms to extend. In more time, mature cacti may reach taller than 40 feet. That’s when Desert Purple Martins tend to make them home,…

ON MAY 11, 2018, ANDREW FARNSWORTH saw something that was almost unbelievable. A migration ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Farnsworth has seen more than his fair share of rare birds. But there was one species native to the Lower 48 that he’d never recorded—a Kirtland’s Warbler—and he assumed doing so would require a trip to its breeding grounds in Michigan’s jack pine forests. The rare warbler is all but unheard of in New York State. That a Kirtland’s came practically to his front door when it stopped over in Central Park, not far from Farnsworth’s Manhattan apartment, was nothing short of extraordinary. “I think it was reported about 5 p.m.,” he says. “I took a cab to 60th and Fifth, bailed out, and then ran. Fast.” After spotting…

LIKE THE BIRDS SHE RECENTLY GOT into watching, Alexis Nikole Nelson sees tasty food everywhere she looks. “I think it’s so exciting that we have all of these flavors hiding in your front yard, a local park, a local woodland,” says Nelson, known as “Black Forager” to her millions of followers on Instagram and TikTok, where her irrepressible enthusiasm and nerdy humor inspire others to give wild food a place at their table. Foraging—harvesting food from nature—provides a deeper understanding of your local ecosystem, its native plants, and the birds that rely on them. You don’t need much to get started: Nelson carries a multitool for snipping stems and a soil knife for cutting roots. It’s essential, however, to eat only what you can identify with absolute certainty. Go with a…

AFTER COLLEGE, KIRSTEN FURLONG DEVELOPED A DEEP INTEREST IN BIRDS WHILE WORKING IN a wildlife photographer’s gallery. The Boise, Idaho, resident’s current obsession is the Bobolink, a songbird whose numbers have plummeted in step with the loss of prairie nesting habitat. To reach these breeding grounds, the birds use the stars to help navigate more than 6,000 miles. “It’s pretty magical,” Furlong says of the feat. Here she depicts two Bobolinks against a star-spangled backdrop. The ink and acrylic drawing is heavy on intricate detail but light on color, with pops of yellow at the birds’ napes and green grass blades that serve as fragile perches or lifelines. The foreground lines are intentionally abstract. “They could be topographic marks,” she suggests, evoking a map a developer might commission before converting…

GOLDEN EAGLES DON’T SEEM likely to become roadkill: They spend their days soaring over the American West’s lightly populated sagebrush sea, not scurrying through traffic. Yet eagles often descend to scavenge carcasses along highways, where they may be struck by vehiclesthemselves, creating a roadkill feedback loop. In five seasons of roadside surveys in Wyoming, Utah, and Oregon, researchers from HawkWatch International found 65 dead Golden Eagles and 14 Bald Eagles—surely a fraction of the true toll. “We’re dealing with many hundreds of Golden Eagles dying on roadways every winter,” says Steve Slater, Hawk-Watch International’s conservation science director. Fortunately, the research suggests there’s a relatively straightforward way to protect eagles. In addition to counting victims, HawkWatch International crews set motion-activated cameras on carcasses of deer, elk, and other animals to see…

The egg posed a problem. Biologist Shawn Farry and his crew had spent much of March and April collecting sick and dying California Condors from the red rock landscape of northern Arizona, including a bird officially known as 316. The 20-year-old female had succumbed to avian influenza shortly after laying her egg in a high cliffside cave. Her mate, 680, now tended the nest alone in a small space that likely harbored the deadly virus. “There wasn’t really anything we could do to help him,” says Farry, manager of the California Condor program at The Peregrine Fund, the conservation group that manages the southwest condor flock—115 birds that roost and roam from the Grand Canyon to Zion National Park. On his own, 680’s chances of hatching the egg were vanishingly…

IT DIDN’T TAKE NEW BIRDER ARIANA Remmel long to realize that to find more birds, it helps to know about native plants. So in 2022 Remmel signed up for the Arkansas Master Naturalist program and, sure enough, its botany and ecology courses made their birding more fruitful. What Remmel didn’t expect was that becoming a Master Naturalist would change their perspective on what it means to be a birder: More than just watching birds, it involves being a steward of their habitat, too. Today, “I am at home taking steps to protect birds,” they say, “putting my hands in the dirt.” Most states have a Master Naturalist program that teaches participants about their environment and connects them with opportunities to become local leaders in hands-on conservation. Trainees participate in about…

SEND US YOUR POSTCARDS! Where did you fly and what did you see? Fill in the blanks or write your own message—we’d love to see it! Are you a teacher? Go to audubonadventures.org/explorer for more resources. FOR MANY PEOPLE, SUMMER means travel season. But humans aren’t the only ones to take seasonal journeys: Birds migrate every fall and spring to find safe habitats with the resources they need to survive and raise chicks. In this activity, you and your child can learn more about where birds go and when with the Bird Migration Explorer, then pretend you’re a bird and tell us about your trip. Ready? Let’s go! 1 Visit the Bird Migration Explorer (explorer.audubon.org) and click “Bird Species.” If you already have a favorite feathered visitor, type its name in…

AS SUMMER WINDS DOWN AND many of the birds that breed in the Arctic and across North America are beginning their journeys south into the Caribbean and Latin America, I have been thinking about how our hemispheric approach to bird conservation—one of the main drivers of our new strategic plan—directs us to work where birds need us the most. Given thatmost vulnerable bird species found in the United States spend the majority of their lives in Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean, Audubon works transparently and creatively across borders, bringing together partners from the public, nonprofit, and private sectors to halt and ultimately reverse the precipitous decline of birds across the Americas. One way that we are doing this is by deploying a new model for effective cross-border partnerships and…

PLASTIC POLLUTION Wasn’t discovered floating mid-ocean, far from any shore, until 1971. Today it’s ubiquitous in the lives of seabirds and other marine life. “There isn’t really anywhere left in the ocean that doesn’t have plastic that these birds can find,” says BirdLife International seabird science officer Bethany Clark. According to a 2016 projection, marine plastic could outweigh all the ocean’s fish within decades without action to contain its production and accumulation. Some seabirds, however, are more harmed by plastic than others. Many species in the petrel and storm-petrel families, for instance, migrate over vast spans of sea and feed on the surface where plastic collects. And unlike albatrosses and gulls, they don’t easily regurgitate bits and pieces, which pile up in their guts instead. What’s more, marine plastic isn’t…

HUMAN INFRASTRUCTURE MAKES the world less hospitable for birds in many ways, but anti-bird spikes are one of the more intentional examples. The pointy wires you see attached to roofs, ledges, and light poles are meant to deter urban species such as pigeons from landing, pooping, and nesting where people don’t want them. But in an avian act of poetic justice, a handful of corvids have struck back: Carrion Crows and Eurasian Magpies are stealing the spikes and repurposing them as nest-building material. Between 2021 and 2023, researchers in the Netherlands documented four nests, each built in a different European city, that heavily incorporated anti-bird spikes. They also learned of a fifth example reported in 2009. One nest, first noticed by a hospital patient looking out of his fourth-floor window,…

CARMELLA STIRRAT KNOWS how to burn a forest. She’s done it dozens of times—often enough that at a prescribed fire in April, she was certain she had time for a rescue mission. She was worried about a particular longleaf pine tree amid thousands of others in the 53-acre burn area at Carvers Creek State Park in North Carolina. Surveyors had recently discovered endangered Red-cockaded Woodpeckers nesting in it. With the fire she’d helped start that morning fast approaching, Stirrat plunged into the brush to ensure the invaluable tree would survive the blaze. She hacked with a mattock at flammable shrubs crowding its base, revved up a leaf blower to clear dry needles that could loft flames into the canopy, then scampered out. The flames arrived, obliterating small sweetgum trees, shrubs,…

IVAN TYMOFEIEV MISSED HIS family in western Ukraine. He’d been working for a large German conservation nonprofit in Berlin and decided it was time for a trip to see his mother in his hometown of Uzhhorod. He also planned a work-related detour: a visit to partners working on a peatlands restoration project in Ukraine’s Zacharovanyi Krai National Park, which he was overseeing from afar. When Tymofeiev boarded a plane on February 10, 2022, he thought he’d be gone a few weeks. A full-scale invasion by Russian forces was a threat, but one Ukrainians had lived with for years, particularly since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Although active fighting had occurred along Ukraine’s eastern border, everyday life was peaceful for most. No one knew when—or how, or if—tensions would come…

SANDHILL CRANES ARE GATEWAY birds: Encountering their impressive size, elegant movements, and prehistoric croaking calls can turn any casual observer into a fullfledged birder. What’s more, their multitudes at migration stopover sites are almost overwhelming in scale, most notably in the spring at Audubon’s Rowe Sanctuary and other sites in Nebraska’s Platte River Valley, where more than half a million cranes congregate. While spring shines a brighter spotlight on Sandhills, fall is a fantastic time to seek them out. For one, it’s a chance to watch firsttime migrants learn the ropes from their parents, which typically mate for life. Autumn also spreads the spectacle of crane migration more evenly across the country. The midcontinent crane population that makes lengthy stops in Nebraska each spring moves briskly southward in fall. But others…

THERE’S SOMETHING MAGICAL about holding binoculars to your eyes and seeing a faraway object appear within reach—especially for children. Many bins marketed toward kids, though, are more like toys than tools. Youngsters past preschool age are generally old enough to use actual binoculars. Bins for budding birders should be small and lightweight; provide a large field of view; and have low magnification, which is more forgiving in unsteady hands. We had a dozen children, ages 3 to 14, put several pairs to the test, including some designed for adults that work well for the smaller set. They reviewed the optics for comfort and feel, ease of focus, and how clearly they could see a bird picture 25 yards away. These kid-approved options offer something for every fledgling birder. STARTER SET Bold…