Three Baby Hawks Most Likely Poisoned

Three Baby Hawks Are Most Likely Dead
By Sewell Chan
New York Times article

One of the adult red-tailed hawks in Riverside Park. (Photo: D. Bruce Yolton via New York City Audubon)

As if this Monday morning weren’t dreary and chilly enough, now comes news that three nestlings born in recent weeks to red-tailed hawks in the south end of Riverside Park are believed to have died.

The body of only one young hawk — or eyas — has been recovered so far. The city’s avid bird-watchers have confirmed that the other two babies are not in their nest and are feared dead as well.

“It’s so devastating,” said Dr. Leslie Day, who recovered the body of one of the chicks on Sunday and kept the body refrigerated to preserve it. This morning, Dr. Day, a naturalist who teaches at the Elisabeth Morrow School and the Bank Street College of Education, gave the body to a friend, the photographer Lincoln Karim, who planned to drive to Delmar, N.Y., near Albany, and turn the corpse over to Ward B. Stone, who runs the Wildlife Pathology Unit of the State Department of Environmental Conservation. Mr. Stone is expected to perform a necropsy to determine the cause of death.

Dr. Day said she first heard something might be amiss on Saturday morning, when she got a call from Beth Bergman, a friend who watches and photographs the birds. Later that evening, Dr. Day received an e-mail message from Mr. Karim, also expressing alarm. (Mr. Karim runs the Web site palemale.com, which follows the lives of two more well-known East Side hawks, Pale Male and Lola.)

“On Sunday morning I went out at 7 a.m.,” Dr. Day said in a phone interview this morning. “Standing at the nest, I could see there were no babies. They had become so large, standing at the rim, strengthening their wings.”

Dr. Day said she told a friend, Cal Vornberger, the author of “Birds of Central Park,” that she was worried. “At that moment a dog walker came by,” Dr. Day recalled, “saying another dog walker had seen the mom carrying her dead baby out to drop on the ground.” The dog walker told Dr. Day that the other dog walker said she could not bear to leave the body on the ground and had placed it in a bag, then in a trash can. Dr. Day and the second dog walker, who herself walked by, went over to the trash can and retrieved the body.
“And this was Mother’s Day,” Dr. Day said sadly.

News of the deaths has quickly made its way across blogs watched by bird lovers.
While the cause of death awaits a toxicology analysis, Dr. Day suspected that the parents may have fed the nestlings pigeons or rats that contained lethal levels of poison — a common cause of death for the delicate hawks.

Bird-watchers said they were saddened by the news. “I’ve lived on Riverside Park since 1969 and it’s only this year that I’ve seen a hawk,” said Carol Andrus, who was walking her Rottweiler, Bruno, on Saturday. “We had a lot of seagulls and robins and other stuff. I’ve been watching these hawks — they are just fascinating birds. On Saturday morning I went to the park really early and a woman was standing there crying, saying: ‘The baby hawks aren’t there. They’re dead.’ About 15 other people were there. I didn’t want to cry publicly. I said to myself, ‘C’mon Bruno, we’re going home.’ I told my daughter and then she started to cry. It’s so sad.”

Sex and the City Bird

You can view the original page on the Sierra Club's website.


Sex and the City Bird
How urban avian types adapt mating, nesting, and other behaviors to survive
By Chuck Baldwin
March/April 2008

CITY FOLKS HAVE ALWAYS SEEN THEMSELVES as a breed apart, tough survivors. Turns out that urban birds, too, may be of a heartier strain. In probing this premise, we at Sierra found ourselves asking some unexpected questions: Is citified sluttiness a survival trait? Does busting a hip-hop move help a metrosexual bird thrive where his country cousin might fail?

To our knowledge, no scientist has yet tested our theory that last fall's Internet video sensation Snowball, a captive cockatoo that sings and dances to the Backstreet Boys, is evidence that avian players are adapting to the rituals of big-city dating. But a recent study by the College of William and Mary did indeed show that--to quote Science News--"female zebra finches, normally devoted to their mates, are more likely to flirt with male strangers" when exposed to city levels of background noise.

With a quarter of U.S. bird species declining or rare, according to WatchList 2007, a joint study by Audubon and the American Bird Conservancy, scientists are increasingly paying attention to how some have adjusted to humanity's spread.

"The urban habitat is usually more severe than the habitats these birds historically occupied," biology professor John Wingfield said following the release of a recent University of Washington worldwide study of avian behavior. "Urban habitats aren't easy, so the birds have to have developed coping mechanisms. . . . In the face of global climate change and human disturbances, such as increased urbanization and deforestation, we may be able to identify species that can cope with such changes," he said. Those that cannot "might even go extinct in the face of increased disruption."

Noting humankind's fascination with (and sometimes aversion to) urban birds, Sierra asked artist Jack Unruh to illustrate a brief tribute to these avian survivalists.


ROCK PIGEONS used to nest in bushes, squat trees, and low rock ledges. But after 5,000 years of living with humanity, they've gone condo, settling in on virtually any flat city surface that offers protection--and usually high off the ground. With generations of use and little "housecleaning," their nests harden into claylike structures that are stronger than the flimsy ones found in more bucolic settings.

Source: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All About Birds: Rock Pigeon

About 120 years ago, Eugene Schieffelin released some 100 EUROPEAN STARLINGS in New York City's Central Park. Like many successful newcomers to the city, they turned out to be an aggressive, resourceful, and omnivorous breed that moves in large flocks when young. The starling's numbers now exceed 200 million in North America, giving such populous species as red-eyed vireos, dark-eyed juncos, yellow-rumped warblers, and robins a run for their money.

Sources: The Urban Naturalist (Dover Publications, 1998) by Steven D. Garber
Complete Birds of North America (National Geographic, 2006), edited by Jonathan Alderfer.

Male EUROPEAN BLACKBIRDS living in cities appear not to stress out as easily as their wild counterparts, and those that tend to stay in town--rather than migrate--apparently develop gonads sooner, begin mating earlier in the season, and have longer reproductive cycles, say researchers at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.

Source: Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science press release: "Stress and the City": Urban Birds Keep Cool (September 1, 2006).

In European cities, GREAT TITS, similar to North America's chickadees, have changed their tune to overcome the din of urban traffic. The sounds of the city generally meld into a low-frequency hum that ranges in volume. In response, these birds have dropped now ineffective low-frequency notes from their songs altogether. Since most tits learn to sing from their neighbors, their repertoire has evolved to higher-pitched frequencies with fewer but stronger notes than in the songs sung by their country brethren only a few miles away.

Source: "Cities Change the Songs of Birds"; Current Biology; volume 16; pages 2326-2331; December 5, 2006; by Hans Slabbekoorn and Ardie den Boer-Visser/

While humans may associate cities with crime, a study of NORTHERN MOCKINGBIRDS in Florida suggests that these "urban winners" are thriving, at least in part, because their nests aren't as vulnerable to natural predators such as snakes. (Mockingbirds in Berkeley, California, meanwhile, have been known to reproduce the entire sequence of a nearby car alarm.)


Source: Selected abstracts on urban bird ecology from the 2006 North American Ornithological Conference.

The PEREGRINE FALCON, the world's fastest bird, usually lays her eggs on a bare cliff ledge near the sea or in the desert. She and her mate then take turns incubating the eggs while the other hunts, sometimes storing food for future use in cliffside caches. In San Francisco, a population of peregrines has eschewed expected behavior and claimed squatters' rights on Bay Area bridges. These urban dwellers hunt on the wing as falcons normally would, catching ever-present pigeons and starlings at the nadir of deep, fast dives. But they keep their caches of food in nooks and crevices of the city's skyline. One couple, adopting the ethic of the Internet age, has taken to cavorting for a "nest cam" set in a wooden box filled with gravel on the 33rd floor of a downtown building. Their exhibitionism has earned them a worldwide audience and blog commentary that might shame Britney Spears.

Sources: Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group, San Francisco Nest Diary 2007
Pacific Gas & Electric Company, 2007 Peregrine Falcon Nest Cam.

Did Your Shopping List Kill a Songbird?

March 30, 2008
The New York Times
Op-Ed Contributor
Did Your Shopping List Kill a Songbird?
By BRIDGET STUTCHBURY
Woodbridge, Ontario

THOUGH a consumer may not be able to tell the difference, a striking red and blue Thomas the Tank Engine made in Wisconsin is not the same as one manufactured in China — the paint on the Chinese twin may contain dangerous levels of lead. In the same way, a plump red tomato from Florida is often not the same as one grown in Mexico. The imported fruits and vegetables found in our shopping carts in winter and early spring are grown with types and amounts of pesticides that would often be illegal in the United States.

In this case, the victims are North American songbirds. Bobolinks, called skunk blackbirds in some places, were once a common sight in the Eastern United States. In mating season, the male in his handsome tuxedo-like suit sings deliriously as he whirrs madly over the hayfields. Bobolink numbers have plummeted almost 50 percent in the last four decades, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey.

The birds are being poisoned on their wintering grounds by highly toxic pesticides. Rosalind Renfrew, a biologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, captured bobolinks feeding in rice fields in Bolivia and took samples of their blood to test for pesticide exposure. She found that about half of the birds had drastically reduced levels of cholinesterase, an enzyme that affects brain and nerve cells — a sign of exposure to toxic chemicals.

Since the 1980s, pesticide use has increased fivefold in Latin America as countries have expanded their production of nontraditional crops to fuel the demand for fresh produce during winter in North America and Europe. Rice farmers in the region use monocrotophos, methamidophos and carbofuran, all agricultural chemicals that are rated Class I toxins by the World Health Organization, are highly toxic to birds, and are either restricted or banned in the United States. In countries like Guatemala, Honduras and Ecuador, researchers have found that farmers spray their crops heavily and repeatedly with a chemical cocktail of dangerous pesticides.

In the mid-1990s, American biologists used satellite tracking to follow Swainson’s hawks to their wintering grounds in Argentina, where thousands of them were found dead from monocrotophos poisoning. Migratory songbirds like bobolinks, barn swallows and Eastern kingbirds are suffering mysterious population declines, and pesticides may well be to blame. A single application of a highly toxic pesticide to a field can kill seven to 25 songbirds per acre. About half the birds that researchers capture after such spraying are found to suffer from severely depressed neurological function.

Migratory birds, modern-day canaries in the coal mine, reveal an environmental problem hidden to consumers. Testing by the United States Food and Drug Administration shows that fruits and vegetables imported from Latin America are three times as likely to violate Environmental Protection Agency standards for pesticide residues as the same foods grown in the United States. Some but not all pesticide residues can be removed by washing or peeling produce, but tests by the Centers for Disease Control show that most Americans carry traces of pesticides in their blood. American consumers can discourage this poisoning by avoiding foods that are bad for the environment, bad for farmers in Latin America and, in the worst cases, bad for their own families.

What should you put on your bird-friendly grocery list? Organic coffee, for one thing. Most mass-produced coffee is grown in open fields heavily treated with fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides. In contrast, traditional small coffee farmers grow their beans under a canopy of tropical trees, which provide shade and essential nitrogen, and fertilize their soil naturally with leaf litter. Their organic, fair-trade coffee is now available in many coffee shops and supermarkets, and it is recommended by the Audubon Society, the American Bird Conservancy and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

Organic bananas should also be on your list. Bananas are typically grown with one of the highest pesticide loads of any tropical crop. Although bananas present little risk of pesticide ingestion to the consumer, the environment where they are grown is heavily contaminated.

When it comes to nontraditional Latin American crops like melons, green beans, tomatoes, bell peppers and strawberries, it can be difficult to find any that are organically grown. We should buy these foods only if they are not imported from Latin America.

Now that spring is here, we take it for granted that the birds’ cheerful songs will fill the air when our apple trees blossom. But each year, as we continue to demand out-of-season fruits and vegetables, we ensure that fewer and fewer songbirds will return.

Bridget Stutchbury, a professor of biology at York University in Toronto, is the author of “Silence of the Songbirds.”

Parrots are Dangerous Wild Creatures

BUYING AND FREEING BIRDS FROM PET SHOPS - SHOULD WE OR SHOULDN'T WE?Doing this promotes the trade; the birds will be quickly replaced.

read more | digg story

Notice: $2,000 Arborcide Reward

ARBORCIDE

35 Eastern Red Cedar Trees were cut down in Inwood Hill Park in the southwest quadrant near the Dyckman Fields on or around March 7, 2008.

$2000 REWARD for information leading to arrest and conviction.

Call the 34th Precinct at (212) 927-0822 with information.

Visit NYC Parks for the latest in Parks news and information.

Please Amend the Migratory Bird Treaty Act

What's At Stake?
Help Raptors, Stop the Illegal Killing

Citizens across the United States were appalled to learn last spring that pigeon enthusiasts in Oregon, California, and Texas have intentionally been killing Cooper's Hawks, Peregrine Falcons and Red-tailed Hawks that they feared might prey upon their pigeons.

The raptors were killed by hobbyists who breed pigeons to carry a genetic trait that causes them to stop flying and tumble in the air before righting themselves and carrying on. These "roller pigeons" are flown in competitions and scored by judges who rate the birds on the quality of the "roll" and other factors. Of course, the pigeon rolling through the air looks like crippled and vulnerable prey to a hawk, falcon, or other bird of prey. Many of these pigeon enthusiasts have been routinely killing raptors in an attempt to protect their roller pigeons.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that as many as 2,000 to 3,000 raptors were being killed on the West Coast each year using methods including poisoning, beating birds to death with clubs, and suffocation in plastic bags. Even more troubling is the fact that the thirteen men charged with these crimes received little more than a slap on the wrist after pleading guilty. Currently, killing a protected bird is a Class B Misdemeanor under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which puts suffocating a Peregrine Falcon in the same category as unauthorized use of the image of Smokey Bear.

Representative Peter DeFazio of Oregon has introduced legislation that would amend the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 so that the intentional killing of protected bird species would be considered a felony, rather than the current Class B Misdemeanor. HR 4093 would send a strong message to prosecutors and courts that Congress takes these crimes seriously. It would pave the way for significant fines (up to $50,000) and jail sentences (up to 1 year) for the most serious bird-related crimes.

Alert

You can read the text of the legislation at thomas.loc.gov.

Contac: Audubon (audubonaction@audubon.org)

The Birds That Used to be Glorious Birds

Courant.com
The Birds That Used To Be Glorious Birds
Exhibits Measure What We've Lost In Our Relationships With Nature
By STEVE GRANT

Courant Staff Writer
February 28, 2008

That people are charmed by the presence of birds in the landscape is understood. Millions of backyard bird feeders is evidence enough.

So it's not surprising that there is an incredible variety of bird art, too. Much of that art is celebratory — exquisitely crafted images of a species, sometimes in natural habitat, à la John James Audubon. We like birds.

Two new exhibitions, one at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the other at Trinity College in Hartford, focus intently on our relationship with birds, but each at least partly explores the dark side of that relationship.

At Trinity, Jeffrey H. Kaimowitz, head librarian at the college's Watkinson Library, put together a small, focused exhibition exploring bird extinctions in the past 400 years, with images and text drawn from the school's invaluable Enders Ornithology Collection, of which he is curator. The exhibit at the library, "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang," also includes three original paintings by Peter Schouten for his book "A Gap in Nature" and a small exhibit on endangered felines.

Birds don't necessarily become extinct because of humans, but in recent centuries, human activities have often been a significant factor in the loss of such species as the passenger pigeon, once among the most abundant bird species in North America.

There are ample examples of celebratory art in the Trinity exhibit, including a magnificent image of the Hawaii O'o, a lustrous black bird with brilliant yellow shoulder plumage. Enjoy the image, though, because, of course, the bird is extinct, like so many other Hawaiian birds. Island bird species, confined to a comparatively small area as they are, are extremely vulnerable. Introduce an alien predator — house cats, wild pigs, some exotic snake — and in no time an island species can disappear.

If there is a species that ties these two exhibits together, it is the passenger pigeon. Unfortunately for the species, passenger pigeons were good eating and easy to kill, often showing up by the tens of thousands and alighting in trees in massive flocks, including here in Connecticut. They were shot by the thousands and sent to market.

By the early 20th century, they were extinct.

The Trinity exhibit includes a nice 19th-century pigeon image from Alexander Wilson's "American Ornithology; or, the Natural History of the Birds of the United States."

In the UConn exhibit, at the Contemporary Art Galleries in the Art Building, artist Christy Rupp's "Passenger Pigeon," a 2006 sculpture of chicken bones and other media, takes society to task for feeding itself cheaply at the expense of key pieces of our ecosystems. That would be those inexpensive passenger pigeons, which were sometimes shipped to market in boxcars.

Rupp takes issues with those who insist technology will find solutions for a consumptive society's excesses.

"By choosing to view environmental and sociological problems as fixable with technology, we ignore the fact that we are part of a system with a delicate balance," Rupp says.

The UConn exhibit, comprising 36 works, all modern art, is at once a nod to the pleasure of watching birds and an acknowledgment that humans too often harm them.

Carsten Holler's series of bird photos "Birds," done in 2006, is bound to confound serious birders. Holler mated birds of different species, creating offspring that look like no other species and cannot reproduce.

As Barry A. Rosenberg, a UConn art professor and curator of the exhibit "Ornithology: Looking at Birds," notes, these birds may look very much like a species you know, but look closely, and they are unidentifiable.

It is Holler's way of drawing attention to extinction, because each of the photographed birds is the last of its kind.

"Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" exhibition at Trinity College includes 29 books, three original paintings and a print, plus five illustrated books on felines. It runs through June 9. The school's Watkinson Library is open Monday through Friday from 9:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m., but beginning mid-May, the library will close at 1 p.m. on Fridays. The library will be open on Saturdays from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. from March 29 through May 3. A talk on "Conservation of Imperiled Birds and Felines: Notes from the Field" will be given March 26 at 4:45 p.m. in the Joslin 1823 Room in Trinity's Library and Information Technology Center. Ornithologist Joan Morrison, the Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor of Biology, and feline expert Dr. Jim Sanderson, will speak.

The UConn exhibition at the Contemporary Art Galleries runs through April 3. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m. It will be closed during spring break March 10 to 14. The Contemporary Art Galleries and the university's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology will hold a symposium featuring internationally renowned artists and ornithologists at the Dodd Research Center's Konover Auditorium April 3 at 2:30 p.m. Both the exhibition and the symposium are free. Among subjects to be discussed is the possible existence of the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Contact Steve Grant at sgrant@courant.com.

To see more photos from the exhibits, visit here.