Latest news with #birdmigration
RNZ News
4 days ago
- Science
- RNZ News
The Chatham Island tui translocation
One from the archives! By the 1990s Chatham Island tūī had all but disappeared from the main island. Slightly different to their mainland counterparts these songbirds had survived on nearby Pitt and Rangatira islands. So a local conservation group decided to try bring them back. In this episode from 2010 Alison Ballance joins the ‘tūī team’ tasked with moving 40 birds from Rangatira island back to the main island. To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Bird experts encourage people to turn off lights in peak migration season
The National Aviary and other bird experts are encouraging everyone to turn off or dim unnecessary lights at night. The request comes as we approach peak bird migration season. As many as 1 million birds could be passing over the Pittsburgh area in a single night. Birds are returning north to their breeding grounds for the warmer months. Ornithologist Bob Mulvihill said the lights can disorient the birds, leading to window collisions. 'They don't understand glass. It can both look transparent to them and they think they can fly through it, or it can fly through it, or it can look reflective to them and they think they are flying to their habitat. Either one has a bad consequence when they strike it,' Mulvihill said. Mulvihill said sometimes birds will end up circling lights in urban areas for hours at a time, thinking they are traveling somewhere else. Members of the Fox Chapel Wildlife Conservation Club are helping to spread the message by placing signs. About 75% of the birds will make their migration at night. Mulvihill said you can help your power bill go down while also helping the birds. Download the FREE WPXI News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Channel 11 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch WPXI NOW
Fast Company
21-05-2025
- Science
- Fast Company
Windows are the leading human cause of bird deaths. Here's how to help
When wood thrushes arrive in northern Mississippi on their spring migration and begin to serenade my neighborhood with their ethereal, harmonized song, it's one of the great joys of the season. It's also a minor miracle. These small creatures have just flown more than 1,850 miles (3,000 kilometers), all the way from Central America. Other birds undertake even longer journeys — the Swainson's thrush, for example, nests as far north as the boreal forests of Alaska and spends the nonbreeding season in northern South America, traveling up to 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers) each way. These stunning feats of travel are awe-inspiring, making it that much more tragic when they are cut short by a deadly collision with a glass window. This happens with alarming regularity. Two recent scientific studies estimate that more than 1 billion birds – and as many as 5.19 billion – die from collisions with sheet glass each year in the United States alone, sometimes immediately but often from their injuries. In fact, window collisions are now considered the top human cause of bird deaths. Due to window collisions and other causes, bird populations across North America have declined more than 29% from their 1970 levels, likely with major consequences for the world's ecosystems. These collisions occur on every type of building, from homes to skyscrapers. At the University of Mississippi campus, where I teach and conduct research as an ecologist, my colleagues and I have been testing some creative solutions. Why glass is so often deadly for birds Most frequently, glass acts as a mirror, reflecting clear sky or habitat. There is no reason for a bird to slow down when there appears to be a welcoming tree or shrub ahead. These head-on collisions frequently result in brain injuries, to which birds often succumb immediately. In other cases, birds are stunned by the collision and eventually fly off, but many of those individuals also eventually perish from brain swelling. Other injuries, to wings or legs, for example, can leave birds unable to fly and vulnerable to cats or other predators. If you find an injured bird, contact a local wildlife rehabilitator. Which windows are riskiest Some windows are much worse than others, depending on their proximity to bushes and other bird habitats, what is reflected in them, and how interior lighting exacerbates or diminishes the mirror effect. On our campus, some buildings with a great deal of glass surface area kill surprisingly few birds, while other small sets of windows are disproportionately deadly. One particular elevated walkway with glass on both sides between the chemistry and pharmacy buildings is a notoriously dangerous spot. The glass kills migratory birds each spring and fall as they try to pass between the two buildings on their way to The Grove, the university's central-campus park area with large old oak trees. During the pandemic in 2020, student Emma Counce did the heart-heavy work of performing a survey of 11 campus buildings almost daily during spring migration. She found 72 bird fatalities in seven weeks. Five years later, my ornithology students completed a new survey and found 62 mortalities over the course of five weeks in 2025, demonstrating that we still have a lot of work to do to make our campus safe for migratory birds. Thrushes, perhaps due to their propensity for whizzing through tight spaces in the shady forest understory, have been disproportionately represented among the victims. Others include colorful songbirds – northern parulas, black-and-white warblers, prothonotary warblers Kentucky warblers, buntings, vireos and tanagers. The good thing is that everyone can do something to lower the risk. Films, stickers or strings can be added on the exterior of windows, creating dots or lines, 2 to 4 inches apart, that break up reflections to give the appearance of a barrier. Exterior screens and blinds work great too. Just adding a few predator silhouette stickers is not effective, by the way – the treatment needs to span the whole window. When applied properly, window treatments can make a huge difference. An inspiring example is McCormick Place in Chicago, the country's largest convention center, which notoriously killed nearly 1,000 birds in a single night in 2023. After workers applied dot film to an area of the building's windows equivalent to two football fields, bird mortality at the lakeside building has been reduced by 95%. The Bird Collision Prevention Alliance provides information on options for retrofitting home or office windows to make them more bird friendly. Options for new windows are also becoming more common. For example, the new Center for Science & Technology Innovation on my campus, which features many windows, mostly used bird-friendly glass with subtle polka dots built into it. This spring, we found that it killed only four birds, despite a very high surface area of glass. How you can help When trying to make a difference on your home turf, I suggest starting small. Make note of which specific windows have killed birds in the past, and treat them first. Use it as an opportunity to learn what approach might work best for you and your building. Either order a product or make something yourself and get it installed. Then do another, and tell a friend. At the office, talk to people, find others who care and build a team to make gradual change. With some creative solutions, anyone can help reduce at least this major risk.
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘No one wants a building that kills birds': why cities are turning off the lights
The wren's legs were tucked delicately underneath its diminutive body, slumped on its side as if asleep. If it wasn't lying on the bare concrete of a Texas street, there would be few clues that it had endured a crunching, violent death. The bird had flown head first into the Bank of America building, a 72-storey modernist skyscraper in the heart of Dallas. Its corpse was catalogued by volunteers who seek to document the toll of birds that strike the glass, metal and concrete structures festooned with bewildering lights that form the skylines of our cities. It's estimated that around a billion birds die across the US each year in this way, one of the leading drivers of an alarming slump in numbers. For the dozen volunteers gathered before dawn to scour downtown for newly dead birds on a balmy May morning, each of these losses is a solemn one. 'If you let it sink in too much about what you're doing every morning, it wears you out, it can be pretty bleak,' says Tim Brys, a community engagement manager at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science and regular bird surveyor for the Lights Out, Texas! campaign. 'It's horrible to think these birds have flown all the way across the Gulf of Mexico only to fly into the first glass building.' The buildings of Dallas, along with those of other Texan cities, are particularly lethal obstacles because they sit on the central flyway, a major migratory route taken by birds as they traverse North and South America. It's thought as many as one in three birds migrating through the US each spring pass through Texas. 'That is a lot of birds,' says Brys. The Lights Out surveys take morning counts three times a week during the peak spring migration season – last year 295 mortalities were recorded. Volunteers have collected and tagged more than 100 species since 2020, including sparrows, doves, warblers, ovenbirds and more unusual finds such as a lazuli bunting or woodcocks, which are normally found in swamps. But there is no way to fully count such deaths, Brys admits, because birds are so regularly thumping into office towers, homes, power lines and, to a lesser degree despite some claims, wind turbines. The losses compound – each killed songbird might make up to six nests a season, with as many as six eggs in each nest. 'So the loss of one bird is 340 or so birds within a two-year span,' Brys says. For birds travelling from darker forests or grasslands, the sudden dazzle of lights and walls of glass found in cities can be a death trap. On maps charting US light pollution, Dallas is a burning beacon, sloshing light up and out of its buildings into the skies rather than focusing it on where it is needed. Most birds are nocturnal migrants, hardwired to navigate by the moon and stars, and the artificial replacements to these wayfinders, plus the reflections in glass, particularly of nearby trees that birds would aim for, cause many to become disoriented and crash into buildings. 'We had a security guard tell us that the birds run into the glass because they are effing stupid,' says Brys. 'And I said 'well, imagine trying to run through a mirror maze at 35mph, how far do you think you would get?' If we had never even seen glass before, how many people do you think would've walked into a glass door or window?' Light pollution has been present since the lightbulb was invented but it's only in the past 20 years that glaring, intrusive light has started to routinely obscure the stars and imperil birds flying at night, according to Teznie Pugh, superintendent of the University of Texas's McDonald Observatory. 'It's become a major concern,' Pugh says. 'Each generation, we are basically halving the number of stars you're able to see at night.' Globally, light pollution has increased by about 10% a year since 2011, a study released in 2023 found. But there has been some progress through a rethink of excess lighting, which is often costly as well as harmful, and the advance of bird-friendly glass, which incorporates dots or stripes to warn birds of an impending obstacle. Cities such as Houston and New York have vowed to lessen bird strikes, with the latter altering its annual 9/11 tribute, in which twin shafts of light are thrown towards the heavens, by switching off the lights for a short period if more than 1,000 birds are trapped, befuddled, in its beams. Chicago's McCormick Place, the largest convention centre in North America, became notorious when 1,000 birds slammed into it one night in 2023. 'That building is a real killer,' says Adriaan Dokter, an ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. But the centre has since installed bird-safe glass, cutting the amount of crashes by about 90% last year. In Dallas, Reunion Tower, a landmark that resembles a giant golf ball on a stick, has dimmed its lights during peak spring migration season and activists are piling pressure on the city's convention centre to take action too. The sprawling building has plenty of darkened glass at bird-flying height, unhelpfully situated near stands of trees. The centre is undergoing a renovation and the Lights Out volunteers are agitating for it to install bird-safe glass. 'Nobody wants to be the building that kills tonnes of birds and a lot of times it a simple solution such as to turn off your lights or use a curtain,' says Mei Ling Liu, a Lights Out organiser at the Texas Conservation Alliance. Progress is complicated by ingrained habits of construction and lighting, exacerbated by LED lights, which are worse for birds and insects but are cheaper and more efficient. Bird-friendly glass also costs more than standard versions. 'It's a challenge,' adds Liu. 'When it comes to light pollution, it's not a single building issue, it's an entire city. And Dallas is still very bright.' As Dallas starts to emerge from its slumber, the hi-vis wearing volunteers continue to find birds on their circuit. A warbler is discovered thrashing on the ground at the foot of a hotel – it is placed into a brown bag to be sent to a rehabilitation centre. A young, dead grackle isn't so lucky, nor is another bird, a splattered warbler, that Liu has to pick up with tongs and shake because it is covered in ants. In all, 12 dead birds are recovered, placed in bags, logged and put into a freezer at the Perot museum, which installed bird-safe glass after some windows were smashed amid Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. A sort of silent spring has enveloped avians, with three billion fewer birds in North America than there were in the 1970s, a loss that researchers have called 'staggering'. Around a third of US bird species are in need to critical conservation action, with numbers plummeting fastest in places where they are most abundant. 'That the declines are steepest in these stronghold areas is really striking and remarkable,' says Dokter. 'We are seeing birds disappear at a rate that, ecologically speaking, is super fast.' The bald eagle and the California condor may have been saved from the brink of extinction but, more broadly, the days are marked by fewer birds now. Passenger pigeons, once so numerous they blotted out the sun while flying overhead, are completely wiped out. Our world has fewer songs, less colour and a dwindling sense of wonder as a result. A toxic tangle of reasons are behind this feathered crisis – habitat loss, chemical use and the climate crisis among them – but the one that appears most solvable is the tragedy of birds crashing into buildings. 'The nice thing about this problem is that it's within our reach to change quickly, it's not like climate change or plastic pollution,' said Dokter. 'Bird-safe designs of windows are the future and more and more cities are realising issues with lighting. We can all influence this, even in our own homes. We can tackle this problem.'
Globe and Mail
10-05-2025
- Science
- Globe and Mail
What we lose when we let AI automate our connection to the non-human world
Marcel O'Gorman is a professor and the founding director of the Critical Media Lab at the University of Waterloo. As you read this, up to three billion birds are on a perilous journey to Canada. They will eschew the land of our southern neighbours, like many wary Canadians in these times, and build their own worlds here. During a time of escalating technopolitical power struggles on a global, these indefatigable cross-border travellers offer us many opportunities for reflection. Allow yourself the luxury of paying attention to them, especially as it happens to be World Migratory Bird Day (WMBD). On WMBD in May, 2024, I was awakened by a riotous cacophony raining down from the trees at Point Pelee National Park. Nestled under wool blankets in a cozy oTENTiK, I reached for my phone and launched the Merlin app. Merlin, an AI-powered wizard conjured by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, features a sound ID function that can identify more than 1300 species of birds. With my head resting comfortably on a pillow, I looked up at the screen and watched in awe as they manifested one by one: red-winged blackbird. Common yellowthroat. Yellow warbler. White-throated sparrow. Rose-breasted grosbeak. And so on. Without Merlin, I could probably only recognize two or three of the 20 or so birdsongs it had recognized. The app had turned me into a birding machine. My collaborator Jen Clary-Lemon, also birding in bed, fetched the checklist we were given at the visitor centre. As we eagerly ticked the boxes next to bird species, a dark mood crept into the oTENTik. After all, we were cheating. There is something unsettling about birdwatching on an iPhone while glamping. We decided that, instead of putting a check mark beside the birds we hadn't actually seen, we'd put an L for 'Listening.' This guilt-motivated gesture felt like a bad compromise, and we could sense the 'real' birdwatchers looking over our shoulders, tsk-tsking us from under their Tilley hats. In fact, we were not birdwatching at all. If anything, we were merely 'app watching.' In hindsight, all those L's are a trace of how it feels to be a Lazy birdwatcher, a birding Loser. But what exactly have we lost in the process? I can't help but relate this experience to a tired old yarn by Plato, often dragged out by curmudgeons who bemoan the rise of a new technology. As the story goes, the deity Theuth (a bird-headed deity, nonetheless) presents King Thamus with the gift of writing. But Thamus refuses the invention and tells Theuth: 'You offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with.' If Thamus refused the gift of writing because it externalizes memory, imagine what he would think of Merlin. Could it be that Merlin, to borrow a line from Nicholas Carr's bemoaning of Google, is 'making us stoopid'? I confess that I have dragged out this Platonic tale for my own writing students during discussions of ChatGPT. AI can strip the presence of a human intelligence from the act of writing. It robs the reader of an intimate connection with the world of another human being: the writer. The same diminishment of presence can happen with bird-identification apps if we let AI automate our connection to the non-human world. There are far worse techniques than AI to identify and count birds. In his short but smart book Bird, Erik Anderson paints an unassuming yet insidious picture of the amateur birder, 'a local gentleman, a true Victorian enthusiast, marching off through meadows, gun slung over his shoulder.' Indeed, collecting birds once meant quite literally killing them and preserving their skins for bragging rights, for financial gain, and only sometimes in the name of science. The history of bird counting is ultimately a history of bird killing. In Sparrow Envy, the naturalist J. Drew Lanham sets out to amend the 'past transgressions of long ago dead and rotted bird watchers.' He is referring primarily to wealthy Victorian collectors who had a 'self-serving penchant for naming things after themselves.' To right this wrong, Dr. Lanham's 'feel guide' to birds includes a ceremony of renaming. Bachman's warbler, an extinct species, is recast as 'swamp cane warbler.' LeConte's sparrow becomes 'orange-faced' sparrow, and so on. He even calls into question the morbid collective noun for crows. There's 'no cause,' he writes, 'to criminalize the corvid kind.' No caws indeed. On a recent visit to the Royal Ontario Museum, my collaborator and I were able to feel the history of bird collecting with all our senses, guided by the now-retired ornithologist and bird curator, Mark Peck. The basement of the ROM is home to more than 130,000 study skins of birds. The skins are stored in large wooden drawers that slide in and out of aging metal cabinets. This is a 'bird morgue,' my collaborator rightly affirmed. Most of these specimens, which consist of the skin and feathers of birds stuffed with cotton, come from private collections and date back to the early 1800s. Many of them were collected during the Annual Christmas Bird Count, an event that began as an opportunity to shoot as many birds as possible before sitting down to a dinner of roasted goose. As the aptly named Dr. Peck opened the first cabinet and slid out a wide, shallow drawer of Spruce Grouse, we were hit by a wave of scent more chemical than organic. It so happens that many of the older skins were preserved with arsenic soap, meaning the bird morgue could be fatal to birds and humans alike. This specific drawer contained about 20 grouse laying on their backs, exposing the striking white barring on their chests. Like many other birds in these cabinets, the grouse were collateral damage from a scientific study. As bird philosopher Vinciane Despret puts it, 'a great many experiments destined to establish in what way the presence of a living creature matters have failed to find any simpler way of doing so than by substituting presence with absence – a method which features in scientific literature under the watered-down name 'bird collections.'' What I felt standing before these grouse is of course not the same feeling I had in the tent at Point Pelee, gazing at a very different sort of bird collection on my iPhone. But the birds in the drawers, like the birds on Merlin, are at once present and not present. They are all birds become data, corresponding to the records in both Merlin's database and the bird morgue's antiquated card catalogue. AI-powered birding apps are merely an extension of this human tendency to quantify everything, to master it and make it intelligible on our own terms. The way humans allow themselves to be present to the non-human world can make the difference between understanding a bird as a companion or as counted, as kin or as skin. On the morning of Oct. 18, 2024, I hoisted my canoe onto my shoulders and made a short portage to the shore of the Speed River. It was World Migratory Bird Day, autumn version. The birds that arrived at Point Pelee six months ago were now on a gruelling journey back to the Southern Hemisphere. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology named the occasion 'Global Big Day,' as it did for the May event, in which 1.3 million people participated worldwide to report 7,725 different species in a single day. I tried to repress the thoughts of Global Big Day as Global Big Data Day when I put my paddle in the water and glided west to the Blackbridge portage. At this time of year, birdsong is somewhat sparse on the Speed River. But as I made my way to the bridge, Merlin lit up frequently to the echoing whistle of northern cardinals, the jeering of blue jays, and the frequent 'conk-la-ree!' of red-winged blackbirds. I stopped at Blackbridge to enter these very ordinary birds into my eBird checklist, then headed back toward Mill Pond, a big draw for shorebirds. Along the way, Merlin generated a list of what a real birder might call 'good birds': species I had not yet ticked off my list, including a golden-crowned kinglet, a northern flicker, a swamp sparrow, and a winter wren. I saw none of them, but Merlin heard them. eBird tutorials suggest that it's acceptable to count a bird you have only heard and not seen. But with the Tilley hats still watching over my shoulder, I resisted this shortcut and allowed the 'good birds' to flit by like so many AI hallucinations. Instead, I parked my canoe near a mudflat where a predictable crew of ring-billed gulls, Killdeer, and Sandpipers had gathered. I counted them, entered them into the eBird app, and pointed the canoe toward home. I had done my duty. I had fed the digital Moloch of bird counting. The trip left me feeling empty inside. On the way back, I spotted a large white bird standing in the reeds by the shore. This was a great egret, a bird I know without the help of Merlin. I have often sat in the canoe at a safe distance from these majestic creatures, trying not to scare them, satisfied simply to be in their presence and watch them fish. This rare opportunity to quietly and mutually observe a being very different from myself has been a source of great solace to me, a humble meditation. The egret was aglow in the direct sunlight, and I was transfixed. But that day I felt something else: the tug of eBird was nagging me. 'Count it,' the app told me impatiently. 'Submit a photo. We have to feed the database!' As I reached for my iPhone, the egret let out a disdainful, prehistoric croak and took flight. I missed the shot. Presence is a manifestation of attention. You are where your attention is. This is why a person might get upset if you look down at your phone during a conversation, an act that has led to the humorous portmanteau 'phubbing' (snubbing by phone). As Vinciane Despret reminds us, making ourselves present to the more-than-human world must also be understood in terms of attention. Or as she puts it, ''giving your attention' to other beings and at the same time acknowledging the way other beings are themselves attentive. It is another way of acknowledging importance.' Is it possible that eBird is an inducement not for birdwatching but for bird phubbing? Did I phub the egret? In spite of what Merlin, and science in general, confidently tell me about Ardea alba, it's what I don't know about the Great egret that captivates my attention. I am comfortable with the fact that the egret is a construct of my imagination, just as it is a construct of science, a construct of art, a construct of indigenous ways of knowing. Can you ever really know an Egret? To be sure, collecting bird data with or without apps – to keep track of the avian population is a crucial part of a broad conservation effort that goes well beyond the wellbeing of birds. And I encourage everyone to take part in the Global Big Day. But nature connection is one of those few aspects of human experience that advanced technologies simply cannot automate. So let's not lose sight of the version of conservation offered by J. Drew Lanham: 'Be the bird. See the miracle in each and every one of them. Conservation is the act of caring so intensely for something that you want only the best for its survival and future being. That intense care and love, is called conservation.'
