World on a Wing

everyone will get started in just a moment all right well people are filtering in um hello and thank you for joining us this evening we are in a zoom webinar for this event so we will not see you or hear you those of you in the audience we do encourage you to please participate and ask questions in the q a feature at the bottom of your screen if you shake your mouse you'll see those speech bubbles down there i am aaron driscoll the adult services librarian at the wilmington memorial library i also want to thank our neighboring libraries in andover billerica chelmsford north reading and tewksbury for partnering with us and helping us to promote this program and wellesley books for providing us with the link where you can purchase a copy of a world on the wing i will post this link in the chat and provide it in our follow-up email for tonight's program i'm so excited to introduce scott wydensall he is the author of more than two dozen books on natural history including the pulitzer prize finalist living on the wind and his latest the new york times bestseller a world on the wing scott is a contributing editor for audubon a columnist for birds watchers digest and write to a variety of other publications including living bird he is a fellow of the american or ornithological society and an active field researcher studying saw at owl migration for more than two decades as well as winter hummingbirds bird migration in alaska and the winter movements of snowy owls through project snowstorm which he co-founded and with that i will turn it over to scott who i'm sure can pronounce ornithological much better than i can i'd say that ten times faster it is a pleasure to be here thank you so much for uh for having me thank you very much to the wilmington memorial library for setting this up and all the partner libraries for pulling this together and i'm sure like most of you i'm looking forward to the day we can all be back in the same room together in person rather than doing this by zoom but in the meantime i'm actually coming to you from milton new hampshire um my wife and i moved up here i'm a native of pennsylvania my wife is originally from massachusetts she works for mass audubon she's in charge of all other sanctuaries on the north shore um really loving living up here in new england although kind of looking forward to a little bit cooler new england weather so i want to talk this evening about bird migration because we are in the thick of the fall migration even though it doesn't seem very autumnal outside i was just saying to aaron before we went live here that last night on weather radar all across the northeast you could see enormous clouds of migratory birds moving on weather radar so so the birds the birds are moving out there and they they know that that autumn is coming even if it doesn't exactly feel like it today so give me a moment here to do the um uh the the screen sharing two step while we switch over and i'll give you something a little bit more pleasant to look at and you should be seeing a title slide right now so so i have been i have been fascinated by bird migration my entire life i mentioned i i grew up and lived almost my entire life in pennsylvania and i got hooked on migration when i was 12 years old actually at a place called hawk mountain sanctuary on the kittatini ridge in eastern pennsylvania watching hawks and eagles and falcons migrating past north lookout on their fall migration and migration has really grown into the defining passion of both my personal and my professional life back in the 1990s i spent almost six years traveling up and down the western hemisphere from western alaska all the way to the southern tip of south america um researching a book called living on the wind about bird migration in the western hemisphere and the book was about what we understood then about the science of migration the mechanics of migration and the conservation landscape for migratory birds but it's been 20 years about more than 20 years now since that book came out and a lot has changed both in our understanding of migration and the challenges facing migratory birds um and i've also my my own involvement with bird migration has changed dramatically over the last 20 or 25 years i do not have an academic degree in science but i've become ever more directly involved in migration research working with as you heard in the introduction collaborators and partners all across north america studying some of the most interesting migratory birds out there and so over the last five or six years i've been back on the road again this time at a global scale looking at what we've what we've learned about migration in the last two decades the new technologies that we're using to to better understand migration and the challenges that are facing migratory birds today in a rapidly changing world and so this new book is is called a world on the way and i'm going to be hitting a lot of the themes from that book in this evening's talk and this comes at a time when we have finally been able to quantify what a lot of us have been birders for a long time have known for a very long time which is that there are not nearly as many migratory birds as there used to be migratory birds are in crisis you may have heard or read this paper that came out in the journal science two years ago um authored by some of the the top ornithologists in north america documenting that we have lost a third of our birds in north america since 1970 almost 3 billion birds fewer today than there were when i was a kid in the late 60s and early 70s and you know that's grim news obviously you look at the groups of birds by habitat group that are in the worst shape well grassland birds birds like eastern meadowlarks and bobblings and upland sandpipers and grasshopper sparrows are in the worst shape and a little wonder given how dramatically we've altered their world how little of their habitat remains out there but i don't want to start out start out this evening with a real with a real buzz kill here because if you look at the other end of the scale um in the in the um the groups of birds and how they fared over the last half century look at what's happened to wetland birds birds you know waterfowl like ducks and geese and swans wading birds like herons and egrets and ibis their populations have actually surged in the last 50 years that provides a road map for restoration for the other birds that are not doing too well and there's no mystery why these birds have done so well starting in the mid 1980s when when waterfowl populations cratered from habitat loss and drought we began investing serious money in protecting and enhancing and restoring wetland popular wetland habitats now and this was driven by concern for primarily for game species for waterfowl which have politically potent constituencies behind them but nevertheless we can do the same thing for grassland birds the group of birds that are in the most serious danger right now in north america and other parts of the world the major problem facing those birds like greater prairie chickens and beard sparrows lecant sparrows lark buntings is habitat loss and if we put the same kind of concerted will and and muscle and political power and funding into protecting and restoring and enhancing grassland habitats that we did wetlands we can bring those birds back not every challenge facing migratory birds is that straightforward we have to remember that we can change things for the better even though the situation looks weak all around the world conservationists are are making demonstrable demonstrable i communicate for a living demonstrable progress on behalf of migratory birds one of the reasons that we're making progress is because we know a lot more about what these birds are doing we're tapping into new technologies that are allowing us to to understand and actually visualize migration at a scale and at an intimacy that we've never been able to to to do in the past that wasn't possible even 10 or 15 years ago i mentioned weather radar a moment ago we can actually quantify exactly how many birds are aloft in the night sky using the doppler weather radar system and immense databases like ebird are painting in the details of what species are where at what times of the year and in what numbers and we're also using ever more sophisticated tracking devices highly miniaturized transmitters this is something that i've been deeply involved in for the last 25 years that are allowing us to follow even the smallest migratory birds across landscape distances and finally tease out where the most dangerous challenges are for these birds where the choke points are in their migration and start to get the most bang from our conservation block and not least of all we've been continually amazed by the physical feats that migratory birds do you know which some of these birds we realize can go months or even years on the wing without resting that they can they can go for months at a time without sleeping feats that seem almost literally unbelievable and so i want to start this evening talking about migration endurance migration can take a lot of different forms you know there are some birds that that migrate hundreds or thousands of miles that are some that are entirely non-migratory there are some birds like dusky grouse in the rocky mountains that actually migrate uphill into the rockies in the winter time on foot but even the smallest migrants do extraordinary things for example this is a semi-pollinated sandpiper this is one of the common peep sandpipers that you find along the coast of massachusetts in spring and fall you know run back and forth you know in the mud flats and tidal marshes these things weigh slightly more than an ounce they're about six inches long and yet they make extraordinary migrations for example the population of semi-pollinated sandpipers that breeds in the eastern and central canadian arctic takes off from the northeastern coast of north america in the fall and flies 3 300 miles nonstop across the western atlantic ocean all the way to the northeastern coast of south america that's the equivalent of a human athlete running 126 consecutive marathons and doing it without food or water or rest you know a couple of years ago when when a a a runner broke the four-hour record for running a marathon he was hailed with justification as being superhuman which is true but he was still distinctly sub-aviant in fact i always get a little annoyed whenever people compare migratory birds to human athletes even the most elite human athlete is operating at a level far below what even a commonplace migratory bird is doing for example you could argue that a male tour de france cyclist is probably probably the human athlete that's functioning at the at the highest level for the longest period of time of any athlete a tour de france cyclist is working at about five times his base metabolism and that's only possible for relatively short periods of time you know basically the course of a day um and only with regular hydration and only with regular food on the other hand that little semi-palm sandpiper flying from the coast of nova scotia to the coast of venezuela is flying for four or five days non-stop and operating at eight or nine times its base metabolism which is already much higher than a human i mean after all this little bird's got a body temperature of about 104 degrees and it goes through basically its weight in food every day in order to function at that at that rate but there is one similarity between what some of these semi-pollinated sandpipers do and at least some human athletes this particular population i'm talking about stops off in the fall on the bay of fundy between nova scotia and new brunswick and the coast of maine and of course the bay of funding has these tremendous tidal surges when the when the tide goes out it exposes hundreds of thousands of acres of mud flats and in those mud flats are trillions and trillions of tiny little crustaceans a little organism called corrophium and the semi-palm sandpipers actually seek out and preferentially feed on corrophia and they're not doing that just because it's nutritious although they are but because the corrophium are very high in omega-3 fatty acids and omega-3 fatty acids basically supercharge the aerobic capacity of the bird's muscles so basically what these birds are doing is juicing on a performance-enhancing drug the difference between that and what some sort of front cyclist not to name names do is that what the birds doing is legal we've also been learning a great deal in recent years about how birds navigate birds have a migratory birds have a whole series of um of environmental cues that they can that they can zero in on to tell them where they are what direction they're going and how far they have to fly we know for example um that they use celestial orientation now they're not looking at the pattern of the stars they're not looking up and saying okay the giant w is cassiopeia so that means i have to make a left they're looking at at not the pattern of the stars but the apparent rotation of the stars the way they appear not to move around polaris that gives them their comp their their their four cardinal directions their compass points east east west north and south um they can also use um a band of polarized light that moves across the sky and lockstep with the sun birds that that migrate during the daytime actually use the position and apparent movement of the sun across the sky as one of their orientation cues birds can smell their way home especially pelagic sea birds can cross thousands of miles of ocean and find their particular nesting burrow along the coast of nova scotia or newfoundland in the dark among millions of other burrows by the way it smells but the most mysterious of all of a migratory bird's navigational cues has always been their magnetic sense we've known since the 1850s that birds have a magnetic sense but until very very recently exactly what that sense entailed was was a mystery when i was in college in the 1970s and took ornithology we were taught that birds had little deposits of magnetite crystals magnetic iron crystals in their beaker at the base of of their brain that essentially functioned like a little compass kind of pulled their nose to the north well it turns out those little deposits aren't actually magnetite they're actually part of the bird's immune system that have anything to do with navigation but the birds do have a magnetic sense and it turns out that what the birds are doing is tapping into a form of quantum physics that was so bizarre that it made einstein queasy even though it grew out of his equations it's a form of quantum physics known as quantum entanglement and if you've heard of quantum entanglement it's probably because scientists think it's going to eventually enable unhackable quantum computers and even faster than light communication but what is essentially happening in the eye of a migratory bird like a summer tanager like this one flying north across the gulf of mexico in the springtime at night which is when most birds migrate a photon of light emitted 100 million years ago from a distant star enters the bird's eye and collides with a pigment molecule known as cryptochrome and when it does that it knocks an electron out of that cryptochrome molecule and into an adjacent cryptochrome molecule those two molecules now have an unequal number of electrons and they become in quantum terms a radical pair they are now entangled and under quantum theory if you moved those two molecules anywhere in the universe whatever distance apart from each other they would still function as one thing what what affected one would instantaneously affect the other that doesn't really matter to the bird what matters is that they become magnetized and so as the bird is flying through the earth's magnetic field these pigment molecules we think are creating waves of pigment in the in the bird's eye that allow it to visualize the earth's magnetic field so we are just breaking the frontiers of quantum entanglement and quantum physics and migratory birds like the summer tannager have been doing it for eons again to you know to to compare a migratory bird to a human athlete is is kind of it's kind of it's kind of rough on the bird um think about a think about a climber summiting everest or k2 in the himalayas they've spent weeks laboring up the side of the mountain from one camp to another slowly acclimating to higher and higher elevations sucking on supplemental oxygen now they're up at what's known as the death zone above 25 000 feet where if you don't have supplemental oxygen your brain cells start to die just barely able to put one foot in front of another and they look overhead and they see flocks of bar-headed geese going over or cranes or ruddy shell ducts flying over the top of the himalayas at 30 or 33 000 feet birds are able to do this because any off-the-shelf bird has a dramatically more efficient respiratory system than a human being you know we have what's known as a tidal respiratory system we breathe in and we exhale out the same pathway and we're really we're woefully inefficient we only use about 10 percent of the oxygen that we pull into our lungs whereas birds have a unidirectional respiration system they actually have this system of nine to 11 air sacs in their body that are connected to their lungs and it takes four respirations for a breath to enter the bird's respiration system and pass all the way through its lungs and these air sacs so they pull more than 90 percent of the oxygen out of the air they breathe bar headed geese like these are even more dramatically efficient at their respiration than most birds they also are somehow we don't really understand how um seem to be immune to the effects of pulmonary edema which which kills an awful lot of human hikers at very high elevation and they're actually able to function at elevations of more than 40 000 feet where the air is so thin that you know if if you were exposed to that you know we would lapse into unconsciousness and die very very shortly which is all amazing enough but you know every time we think we understand what the physical limits of bird migration are the birds blow right past them for example in 2013 scientists in switzerland were interested in where alpine swifts like this one go for the winter they knew that they they migrated from from central europe down into western africa but they were curious about exactly what roots they take exactly where in africa these birds spend the winter so they captured some of these birds and they put tiny little data loggers on their on their backs data loggers they don't transmit information they just log they just record information and these data loggers would do two things they would record the position of the bird so that when they came back the next year and the scientists downloaded the data they could see where they traveled to and they also had tiny little accelerometers in them the scientists knew how much of the bird's day was spent flying and how much of the bird's day was spent resting on the breeding grounds in europe and they were interested in getting that information for migration and also for their time in africa so they capture these birds they tag them they send them off they go to africa they come back the next year the scientists recapture them download the data find out where these birds have been yes these birds traveled down to a small area in western africa but when they looked at the accelerometer data they were flabbergasted because according to the accelerometer the birds did not stop flying for seven and a half months the entire time that they were in migration on their wintering grounds in africa and migrating back north to switzerland well this is insane they thought this can't possibly be right accelerometer must have broken they looked the next bird same thing they look to the next bird same thing and then two years later scientists in sweden working with common swifts replicated the experiment and discovered the common swift spend ten months of the year in constant continuous flight never setting foot on earth never pausing for a moment now swifts are the most aerial of all birds they eat on the wing they mate on the wing if they could figure out a way to incubate eggs on the wing they probably do away with nests entirely and yet still the idea of a bird spending 10 months on the wing is astonishing for example how on earth do they sleep well it turns out that birds migratory birds in particular are able to do something called unihemispheric sleep so a little blackpole warbler like this one taking off from the northeastern coast of of north america from for example from cape cod flying out over the western atlantic ocean for 90 or 100 hours non-stop to south america they don't stay awake entirely that trip um instead what they do is they they put alternating halves of their brain to sleep sometimes just for a few seconds at a time and switch from one side to the next to the next to the next and with those little micro naps they're able to stay healthy alert and avoid the effects of sleep deprivation and in fact birds can do this not just for days or weeks or months some of them can do it for years city turns which are a pan pan-tropical species they breed in the caribbean all across the indian ocean in the pacific when a young city turn leaves its its breeding colony um it will spend the next four or five years at sea unable to land on water because they are not waterproof city turns spend four or five years in continuous flight uni hemispheric sleep comes in awfully handy when you can't tuck your head underneath your wing and take a good night's sleep for five years at a time but no bird can make an epic migration without the right resources at especially at both ends of the trip and one of the most extraordinary migrations of all involves this particular bird this is a bar-tailed godwit and even if you're a birder you might not have ever heard of a bar-tailed godwood this is a very large shorebird about the size of a pigeon or a small duck they breed across eurasia and there's a small population that breeds in western and northern alaska and those alaskan bartail godwoods have the longest non-stop migration of any land bird that we know of every year they take off from the coast of alaska and fly 7 700 miles non-stop across the widest part of the pacific ocean this is a trip that takes them somewhere between seven and 11 days depending on the bird and the particular route that they take and they're only able to do this because before they take off from alaska they undergo a phenomenon called hyperphagin it's basically binge feeding you've seen hyperphagia at a family reunion when uncle fred goes through the buffet line they just eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and they more than double their weight over the course of about two weeks by the time these birds are ready to take off they are 55 percent fat they they jiggle when they walk that when you when you handle one they they're squishy like a water balloon and then they take off no longer needing their digestive system so they get rid of it in the days before they migrate their stomach their intestines and to a lesser extent their kidneys and other internal organs shrink dramatically well at the same time their um their heart muscle increases 30 to 50 percent in mass and their chest muscles their pectoral muscles that power their flight increased 50 in mass without exercise we would very much like to know how to do that by the way and then they take off they make this extraordinary flight to the north island of new zealand or the coast of australia land regrow their guts and spend the austral summer our winter down there in new zealand and australia and then our spring the austral autumn in march and april the whole process starts over again hyperphagia they bulk up in weight their guts shrink down they take off but they don't go back across the pacific ocean instead they make a 6 000 mile non-stop flight from new zealand and australia to the yellow sea between china and the korean peninsula where they land regrow their guts bulk up in weight again guts shrink down and they make a mere 4 000 mile final leg of their flight from there back up to alaska in all these birds will have flown about 18 000 miles a year spending a total of about 22 days in flight bartel godwins can live 25 to 30 years by the time they're done by the time they die they will have flown the distance from here to the moon and most of the way back again but the only reason they can do it is because they have these three extraordinarily rich resource-rich places at each end of the migration these are crucial links in the migratory chain and one of them in particular the yellow sea in china and the koreas is extraordinarily endangered about 60 or 70 percent of the title wetlands in the yellow sea on which some 11 to 13 million migratory shorebirds and millions and millions of other migratory songbirds and waterfowl and other species depend have been destroyed the mud flats along the yellow sea are the largest in the world when the tide goes out maybe it goes out this is a picture of a place called chaozini along the coast north of shanghai when the tide goes out there it goes out about 20 or 30 kilometers and while the mud looks featureless it is it is a stew of of um marine invertebrates it's a buffet for any hungry bird that's just flown 6 000 miles and desperately needs food before it makes the next life of its journey but as i said in recent decades particularly china and south korea have destroyed millions of acres of former mud flats they've built sea walls they pump hundreds of millions of square meters of sediment in there to create either dry land for industrial sites or new cities or deep aquaculture ponds for jellyfish and shrimp and and um and fish which because they are so deep are no longer of any use to these short-legged shorebirds so the the remaining birds have been squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces with cataclysmic effects on their populations the lse is especially critical for a bird that is really the poster child for yellow sea shorebird conservation this is certainly the world's strangest and most endangered shorebird it's called the spoonbilled sandpiper it's the only shorebird in the world that has that funky spatula there are only about 400 spoon-billed sandpipers left in the world they breed in the russian far east they winter in southeast asia and twice a year they utterly and completely depend on the yellow sea during their migration from their breeding grounds to the wintering grounds chinese conservationists like zhing li who founded a small nonprofit called spoonbilled sandpiper in china and international experts like the dutch shorebird scientists tunis piersma there with gray hair with uh one of his chinese grad students big jew these folks have focused a lot of international attention on the importance of the yellow sea the fact as as tunis told me we're down to a birds per hectare equation for every new acre of of reclaimed um destroyed wetland along the yellow sea coast birds die because they simply have no other place to go a few years ago when south korea built a 21 mile long sea wall that blocked the tide from 150 square miles of formerly fertile tidal marsh on which a fifth of the world's great knots depended a fifth of the world's great knots disappeared then you go somewhere else they vanished probably all dead here's the good news all of those efforts all of that lobbying paid off in a dramatic fashion just a couple of years ago just before my visit to the llc in the spring of 2018 the chinese government issued a sweeping ban on all further coastal reclamation along the chinese side of the yellow sea and a year later the unesco the world heritage um the world heritage program approved china's nomination of almost half a million of the most critical acres of shorebird habitat along the chinese side of the yellow sea as unesco world heritage sites there's another 600 000 acres of shorebird habitat that china has now proposed for a second round of unesco protection um china is is obligated under international treaty to provide the highest level of protection to those unesco world heritage sites um conservationists like like tunis and jang and some of the other folks that i was meeting with when i was there in 2018 found themselves dealing with an unfamiliar emotion in the wake of this news which was hope and yet there are a lot of other problems facing migratory birds in asia and elsewhere illegal hunting and illegal trapping for the pot for food is a significant problem for migratory birds in much of the old world that's one of the probably the single biggest reason why spoon-built sandpipers are as critically endangered as they are and this is not a problem that's restricted entirely to asia in fact some of the worst illegal bird trapping in the world for the pot occurs around the mediterranean along flyways that are used by such eurasian african migrants as this female eurasian black cat a common species of old world warbler now as you might expect um this problem is especially severe in countries like egypt where there's poor law enforcement about five and a half million birds mostly songbirds killed illegally every year in egypt mostly mostly to eat um and i want to i want to stress this is not for the most part subsistence trapping which are not people necessarily doing this to put food on their the table for their for their children so it's it's in many cases it's large-scale commercial trackers operating in countries like syria almost 4 million birds a year 11 and 2 and a half million birds a year well okay these are these are conflict zones there's not a lot of law enforcement there but actually every year in france about half a million songbirds are killed illegally for food um critically endangered species like ordellon buntings many species of thrushes that are noosed by the neck or caught in leg traps and the most dangerous country in uh in in europe for a migratory bird is actually italy about 5.6 million songbirds killed particularly in northern italy every year for food in all of somewhere between 11 and 36 million birds killed every year in the mediterranean basin illegally for food sometimes it seems like a miracle that any bird can make it out of europe alive but in per capita terms both from a population and a land area land area perspective the black hole of the mediterranean in the words of one conservationist i spoke to is the island of cyprus in the eastern mediterranean south of turkey about two and a half to three million birds killed every year in an area about the size of the state of connecticut and in recent years the number has been as high as 10 million birds every year now in cyprus the trapping was originally done using a technique known as lime sticking and lime doesn't have anything to do with little green fruit that you cut up and put in your corona beer lime comes from an old indo-european word meaning sticky or gooey and the lime that is used in cyprus is based on the extraordinary gooey sticky fruit of the syrian plums i was not sufficiently warned how damnably difficult it was going to be to get the stuff off my fingers before i squished one of these things between my fingers they mix syrian plums with honey and a number of other a number of other ingredients to make this this gooey glue which is smeared on sticks and then placed in trees and shrubs where birds like this black cap are going to are going to um to land and if they touch the tip of a feather the tip of a beak the tip of a of a toe to that they are glued fast and there's really no way to get them off without ripping feathers and skin free and the point of all this in on the island of cyprus is a traditional dish known as ambala puglia which are basically small songbirds particularly fall fattened black pole warblers they're suiting um black cap warblers on their migration to africa plucked roasted whole and eaten you pick them up by the head you bite through the neck you crunch everything down blood and bones and guts and all the rest of it and i apologize because i realize this is right after dinner and again this is not subsistence hunting this is illegal and a plate of of ambulance like this is going to set you back 60 to 80 euros 80 to 100 um and the trappers that are doing this today in cyprus are for the most part not using lime sticks they're using mist nets they're using sophisticated audio lures to draw these birds in this is mostly organized crime and this is happening on an industrial scale and until fairly recently the worst of the area with the with the the worst problem were actually two british controlled military bases in southern cyprus where for a number of political reasons the british government had turned a blind eye to this but thanks to international pressure in recent years they've done a 180 and i had the opportunity to spend time in the field with some of the um some of the agents the uh the cypriot base police that are that are working these anti-poaching squads it's the only time in my life i've ever been asked what size bulletproof vest i take extra large two of them please and they're using some pretty sophisticated techniques they're using very high-tech drones with with infrared cameras so they can find these these trappers who are for the most part working at night in the early morning hours um they're using surveillance cameras and hidden video and they have pretty much shut down the the large-scale industrial trapping on these british bases now unfortunately a lot of that trapping seems to have moved into the turkish-controlled northern part of the island of cyprus which has been divided um by a u.n buffer zone for for many many years um but it is a dramatically better situation for micro tree birds in cyprus than it was even just a few years ago but you know if only all the problems facing migratory birds were as simple and straightforward to deal with as um as illegal bird poaching that's simply a law enforcement problem that's solvable climate change is without question the single biggest and most challenging issue facing migratory birds today and you know i have to tell you whenever i run into somebody who um is skeptical about climate change and whether it's a problem and whether it's real and whether people are are at the root of it i tell them at this point i really don't care what they think the birds know the climate is changing and they're they're they're changing in sync with it um the question is can they change fast enough for example a couple of years ago the national audubon society analyzed 50 or 60 years worth of their christmas bird count data and found that hundreds of species of migratory birds in north america have shifted the center of their winter abundance dramatically north just in the last 40 or 50 years and you look at long-term data sets like the one that's been maintained for more than a hundred years at mohank house in upstate new york where scientists and and and um uh passionate amateurs have for more than a century kept track of the first arrival dates for many species of birds when trees leaf out when certain species of wildflowers bloom you have this what's known as a phenological record phenology the timing of nature and we can see that spring is coming earlier and earlier every year it's advancing through the decades and some species of migratory birds are are advancing with it for example species like fox sparrows and eastern phoebes and eastern tokies are showing up on average about two weeks earlier in the spring than they did a hundred years ago and leaving as much as two weeks later in the fall so we're seeing some adaptability there which is certainly very encouraging but these are almost entirely birds that are short or moderate distance migrants these are mostly birds that winter in the united states maybe parts of northern mexico a bird like a fox sparrow that spends the winter in georgia or alabama it can tell whether it is an early warm spring with one warm south wind day after another or a cold late winter with one cold front coming down from the north after another and they can change the timing of their migration and be flexible in the face of the of those changing winter weather conditions for long-distance migrants birds like black-throated green warblers that winter in the highlands of southern um central southern mexico or central america um or black bernie and warblers that winter in the foothills of the andes or red red eyed virios that winter in the amazon basin these birds are coming back on average to the day when they did a century ago so they're coming back when they always have but the seasons are getting earlier and earlier so every year we get they find themselves a little farther and a little farther and a little farther out of sync with the seasons and that's a problem and we can see what kind of a problem that eventually may be here in north america by looking at what's happening in parts of europe this is a a pied flycatcher it's an old world flycatcher it is a a trans-saharan sub-saharan wintering bird breeds in central and western europe it winters in sub-saharan africa and it has a pretty grueling migration route it has to cross first the saharan desert and then the mediterranean sea on its way back to europe every year and it times its migration so that's able to come back to europe find a nest site these are cavity nesters so they're looking for a natural cavity in a tree or a nest box find a cavity set up a territory find a mate build a nest lay their eggs and have their chicks have so the chicks are at their hungriest at the same point when the caterpillar peak in the hardwood forests of europe crescendos basically there's this enormous wave of caterpillars in the weeks after the emergence of leaves and those caterpillars are what almost all migratory songbirds both in europe and here in north america feed their chicks the problem is the pine fly catchers are coming back when they always did and the spring in springtime in europe has gotten dramatically earlier and so these birds have fallen so far out of sync with the seasons that their populations have crashed um down by more than 50 percent in the uk and by as much as 90 in parts of europe places like the netherlands we haven't seen those kind of dramatic collapses of migrant songbird populations in north america yet possibly because our birds don't have as far to go um they winter much closer to their to their breeding grounds mostly in the caribbean and southern mexico and northern central america but it will happen and that's not to say that we haven't seen climate-related problems for our migratory birds one of the weird things about migrants about about climate change is it doesn't make everything uniformly warm everywhere some places get dramatically warmers others not so much some places actually get colder or cooler at certain times of the year some places get get get wetter some places get drier one place that's really gotten slammed in in kind of a double whammy a climate double whammy is the eastern and central canadian arctic this is an area where in late winter and early spring the climate has actually gotten dramatically colder and snowier but mid and late summer have gotten dramatically hotter so for species of birds that that migrate long distance to distances to breed there like redneck fowler groups like this one that winter off the pacific coast of south america um hudsonian godwits that winter in southern south america um these birds travel as much as 9 000 miles to get back to hudson bay or the eastern canadian arctic and when they arrive everything's locked up in snow and ice and they can't start to breed as early as they traditionally did so they wait and they wait and they wait and then finally they're able to lay their eggs and start incubating and the chicks hatch and boom by that point the climate switch flips and it becomes drastically warmer and the insects on which their chicks must feed and shorebirds like godwits and fallow ropes they don't feed their babies their babies come out of the egg able to feed themselves they have to find their own food they need lots and lots of insects unfortunately because of that dramatically warmer weather the insect peak has already passed by the time those chicks reach their hungriest and many years these birds are unable to breed successfully so we are starting to see some drastic changes because of because of climate alterations among north america's birds look the challenges facing migratory birds are enormous and we know that migration is the most dangerous part of a bird's annual cycle that's when they face the greatest risks that's when they suffer the greatest mortality but we know the least about their lives during migration but we have new tools at our disposal that are giving us a window into migration and at a an absolutely unprecedented level of detail and maybe just in the nick of time to give us the information we need to turn things around for migratory birds i mentioned the doppler radar system earlier this is this is i can guarantee you the national weather service did not build 143 doppler weather stations across the lower 48 with any idea of helping ornithology but boy howdy has it been a boon for ornithologists because um doppler radar especially the new dual polarization doppler radar that we're using these days can actually tell us precisely how many birds are aloft in the night sky when most of these birds are migrating can tell us how many birds per cubic meter of airspace are up there when you see a picture like this of the doppler weight radar image all of those blobs of blue around metropolitan doppler radar sites are migratory birds you can go to cornell lab of ornithology's birdcast website at this time of the year and it will tell you in real time how many hundreds of millions of birds are in the night sky at that particular moment on a big night during fall migration it's not unusual for there to be three quarters of a billion birds flying over the lower 48 and this is something you can pull up on your own computer you don't need anything special for this just pull up pull up the doppler the doppler radar system and you can see those birds yourselves and because of advances in computing power that allow us to crunch really enormous data sets we have archived weather radar data that goes back 25 or 30 years so we can basically look back in time minute to minute hour to hour month to month year to year and see how migration has changed we can see how bird populations have changed how their migration routes have changed and in fact you know we can see that we've lost birds you know that that 3 billion birds that we've lost over the last 50 years we're not pulling that number out of out of somebody's hat that's based in significant part on archived weather radar data that shows us exactly what the trends are the thing about bird about weather radar and bird migration is that it is in the words of one scientist taxonomically agnostic you can tell us how many birds are up there it can distinguish small birds from medium-sized birds from big birds but it can't tell us what species they are for that we need other forms of big data and one of the most important is ebird which is a micro a bird observation database at the cornell lab of ornithology it's grown in the last 20 years it's grown into the largest wildlife database on the planet with they just passed a billion sightings that have been logged into into ebird and what that's given scientists an opportunity to do is to look at bird migration at an extraordinary level of detail this is an animation showing wood thrush migration up into north america back across the gulf of mexico down into their wintering range in um in mexico and central america and that's based on ebird data it's based on on some habitat modeling and it's giving us an opportunity not just to see where these birds are going but to make boots on the ground differences for migratory birds for example a couple of years ago in california's central valley which is one of the most important linchpins in the pacific flyway scientists with the nature conservancy realized that they could take ebird data which told them what species of migratory shorebirds were passing through the central valley exactly what timing and exactly what number and combine that with high resolution satellite imagery from nasa that showed surface water conditions throughout the agricultural lands of the central valley what had originally been millions of acres of wetlands is almost entirely agricultural in now they realized that they could pay farmers relatively small amounts of money to flood their rice fields to precise deaths at precise times for just relatively short periods of time just to benefit migratory shorebirds just as they're passing through in the spring and again in the fall they could basically create tens of thousands of acres of what they call pop-up wetlands for very very little money especially with what compared to buying up extremely expensive agricultural land um you know in some years if there's a lot of if there's a lot of rainfall which frankly doesn't happen in california a lot these days they don't have to do it at all ebird and radar have also shown us what an impact light pollution is having on bird migration particularly here in the northeast in urban areas and especially in the fall migration where most of the birds migrating south are young birds on their first migration i mean after all these are birds that evolved to navigate by starlight and so as you can imagine all of that urban light pollution it's almost like moths to a flame it draws these birds into urban areas so that gives us two really important ways that we can make a difference for migratory bird conservation for one thing we can encourage people to turn out their lights during during the migratory season now obviously you don't want people to have to turn out their lights for months and months at a time but we know from radar and from ebird that most migration occurs spring and fall over the course of just a couple of nights in most metropolitan any given metropolitan area and we can look at radar and we can look at at weather forecasts and we know pretty much what those big migration nights are going to be so in cities like cleveland and new york and pittsburgh and philadelphia and toronto which have lights out campaigns the word can go out to municipal leaders and to skyscraper owners turn out your lights tomorrow night it's going to be a big migration night and it also tells us that the bird habitat in urban areas is incredibly important urban parks like central park mount auburn cemetery in boston fairmount park in philadelphia these are life rafts for for hundreds of thousands to millions of migratory birds every year so perhaps we we need to divert some of our conservation funding to improving and restoring and enhancing bird habitat in those in those parks which are mostly managed just for human recreation there's no reason why we can't have both we're also benefiting from an explosion in new tracking technology and as i said earlier this is something i've been directly involved in in a lot of the the research projects that i've been doing over the last couple of years um for example for the last seven or eight years i've been involved with something called project snowstorm where we've been using high-tech gps gsm transmitters which um basically they use two technologies most of you are carrying around in your pocket right now they communicate with the gps satellite system overhead and they record highly precise um latitude longitude altitude and flight speed information um as frequently as every six seconds um on these snowy owls that we're tracking um across the northeast great lakes and the great plains and then the transmitter dials up through a cell phone modem and sends us the uh the data through the gsm cell phone network so my my standard joke is that my friends are cooler than your friends because i get text messages from snowy owls and by the way if you're interested in what we're doing with project snowstorm that web address right there www.projectsnowstorm.org go there and you can follow the tracks of all the 90 plus snowy owls that we have that we have put transmitters on over the last number of years including quite a few of them in the state of massachusetts my good friend norman smith newly retired from mass audubon has been tracking snowy owls for years he was one of the founding members of project snowstorm you know snowy owls are big they can carry a fairly large transmitter our ability to track small birds across long distances has always been hampered by the fact that sometimes the transmitter is way more than the birds do but there have been such advances in the miniaturization of tracking technology that now we can follow even the smallest migratory birds in fact even migratory insects like monarch butterflies and drink green dragon green dirt or dragonflies across landscape distances one of the ways we're doing that is through something called the modus wildlife tracking system which was the brainchild of birds canada um and it's now a a network of oh something like 1300 automated receiver stations around the world most most especially in eastern north america and these trans these receiving stations which basically look like somebody forgot to take down an old-fashioned television antenna are tracking these tiny tiny tiny little nano tag transmitters i've been involved with a group called the northeast modis collaboration which was founded in pennsylvania we've been we've we've built about 100 of these receiver stations across new york and the mid-atlantic and we're now partnering with new hampshire audubon mass audubon maine audubon and a number of the state wildlife agencies including the mass division of wildlife to um to build modis network tracking receivers across new england we're going to be putting about 50 of these up including quite a few of them that are going up in massachusetts we just put one up at ipswich river wildlife sanctuary earlier this summer and you can go to the modis website which is www.modismotus.org modis is just a latin word meaning movement and you can see all the data from all of these transmitters at all of these receiver stations so if you're interested in for example the migration of common nighthawks you're interested in their migration to south america boom there it is this is a golden age for wildlife tracking and so much of it is easily accessible by the public and i have to tell you if you're if you're an educator it's a great way to to take a multi-disciplinary approach with with all of the stem subjects and get kids excited about it because kids love migration sometimes though for for those of us who study migration who love migratory birds um it can it can hard it can be hard to keep your spirits up you know the hardest thing sometimes to find is hope the challenges seem so huge everything is so daunting it can really be easy to despair which is why i want to leave you here this evening with one last story that kind of shows what can be accomplished by by anybody anywhere in the world from migratory birds you know it's rare when you find a story that encapsulates so many of the challenges that are facing migratory birds but you come out the other end i'm feeling feeling that you're in a pretty optimistic frame of mind so i want to take you to one of the most remote places in asia actually one of the most remote places i've ever traveled in a lifetime of traveling to remote places these are the mountains of nagaland in a remote corner of northeastern india a little bit of india that sticks up between myanmar burma and and china every year millions and millions of amor falcons which breed in siberia and northern china and mongolia these falcons are enroute from their breeding grounds in northern asia to their wintering grounds in southern africa and they gather in this ruggedly mountainous lightly populated region of northeastern india these birds are largely insectivorous they're about the size of our american kestrels and they and they gather in nagaland to feed on trillions and trillions of termites that have have emerged from underground in the wake of the um of the the seasonal monsoon rains and they need that food they need those termites because they have one of the longest possibly actually the longest migration of any raptor on earth um about 90 000 miles from northern from northern asia to southern africa including the longest over water crossing of any bird of prey on the planet about 2 400 miles across the indian ocean this is an extraordinary trip and they can only do it with full gas tanks which is why they gather in they gather in nagaland to feed on these termites now nagaland is a somewhat troubled part of the world as you can tell from this google earth map you see all those red borders there those are disputed boundaries between india and china that's land that those two countries went to war over in the 1960s they almost went to war over it again just in the last couple of years nagaland itself has been trying to break away from the rest of india since the 1940s it's the it's been the site of the longest-running guerrilla war in in asia it's been going on for almost 80 years um it is uh it's an area that had been closed even to other indians until recently and even today you need special permits from the indian government to travel there the reason that we're talking about nagaland is because in the fall of 2012 um a naga-born conservationist that woman there on the right her name is bono bono is a a quite well-respected print and television journalist she'd made her career elsewhere in india but um in the early 2000s she moved back to nagaland and founded a small conservation non-profit and in the fall of 2012 um bono and her her colleagues there from um conservation india had heard reports about these huge numbers of um of of amore falcons that were gathering in this remote part of nagaland and they wanted to follow up on theirs on these reports themselves and so they headed into a village called pang tea to find out what they could and frankly what they found horrified them they found the falcons all right they also discovered that the villagers from pang tea and some of the surrounding communities were catching killing and selling for food about 140 000 falcons during about a 10-day period during the peak of the migration in late october and early november now i want to stress again this was not a subsistence hunt and this is not a traditional hunt um the naga the the naga tribes had never hunted these falcons in the past they're farmers but what had happened in the early 2000s the indian government built a huge hydroelectric dam along the doyon river that flooded their farmland and for reasons that we really nobody can explain even today these falcons which were already passing in large numbers through this area every year on their migration began gathering in extraordinarily dense nighttime roosts in in groves of trees um along the along the reservoir well the naga had lost their farmland they couldn't really fish in the reservoir because they didn't cut the trees down before they flooded the valley so it's a bad place to try to use fishing nets but they could use their fishing nets and put them in the trees and catch enormous numbers of these birds and sell them for cash money which most of these families were using to pay for their children's education um these this was seen by the naga as quite literally manna from heaven because one of the interesting things about nagaland in addition it's it is sort of the defiantly un-indian part of india is it is an officially english-speaking um state it is also 95 baptist so when i say they thought it was manna from heaven i am not making an allegory there well as you can imagine um when word of this got out it it created an international outro uh a poor um people were outraged and quite concerned because even though amor falcons are common no no species of bird of prey has the the reproductive potential to withstand that kind of annual slaughter um so when something like this happens when there's when when there's this this immense slaughter going on and you've got conservationists on one side and villagers on the other that desperately need the money they're getting from this you can imagine this is going to be a long drawn-out slog to find some sort of a um to some some sort of a uh god i've totally i totally think in the word i'm looking for a resolution is what i'm trying to say um that did not happen in this case um in fact a really remarkable thing happened in part because of increased law enforcement this was after all an illegal technically an illegal kill that the indian government had been turning a blind eye to for a long time um you know but also primarily because of a massive conservation effort people sat down with village elders and village leaders and and and religious leaders which was an extremely important aspect of this whole this whole story and said look these birds are traveling 18 000 miles a year and they're gathering here in huge numbers because they need this food before they make this extraordinary journey and if you keep doing it these birds are going to disappear and the naga said we didn't know that we'll stop and they did literally from one year to the next 140 000 dead falcons one year virtually none the next year it was one of the most extraordinary um and and i have to say unpredictable um successes for conservation that any of us had ever heard of and within a year or two the world went from condemning them to praising them for the remarkable change in nagaland but you know part of the reason the naga were so willing to turn away from hunting and turn to conservation is that they were also told this oops sorry that this is one of the most extraordinary um spectacles in the world this is this is this is a mind-blowing natural spectacle to see tens to hundreds of thousands to millions of falcons gathered in this one place and people are going to want to come to see this tourists are going to want to come to see this so the promise of tourist dollars was certainly one of the reasons why they were willing so quickly and so easily to turn away from hunting but what happens when poor people do a very hard thing expecting one outcome which may not materialize for quite a while may not materialize at all so in the fall of 2017 with my good friend kevin lachlan from wildside nature tours in pennsylvania i decided to take a couple of people um into nagaland to see for ourselves what was going on there and also to find out whether it was possible for us to take american tour groups in to help support this nascent conservation effort but i am here to tell you it is not easy to get into nagaland um you know even leaving aside the issue of permits and and and um and and bureaucratic red tape just the logistics of getting and these are some of the worst roads i have ever traveled on a lifetime of traveling on bad roads that is an active landslide zone that we are driving through right there and what they do when a landslide takes out the road is they just bring a bulldozer in bulldoze another road right across it and they just use it until the next landslide takes it out and you just gotta hope that you're not the person who's crossing that landslide zone when the when the when the land goes away and i should also tell you that slope continued for about another 200 feet down beyond outside the frame of that photograph i have never been so terrified in my life we were also told do not be on the road after dark the risk of armed bandits was very high and um i mentioned that there is a guerrilla war going on there armed insurgents maoist guerillas coming in from myanmar um given the cosmic weirdness of nagaland the maoist gorillas are also primarily baptist it is a really crazy place we did eventually make it to pang tea before dark pang tea like most naga villages sits high on top of easily defensible ridges um through much of the 20th and even into the late 20th century there was still a lot of inter-tribal warfare going on among the the the the dozens and dozens of tribal divisions in nagaland and until at least the mid and again perhaps as late as the 1980s um those those inter-tribal those inter-tribal wars also resulted in head hunting because the naga the naga were until fairly recently head hunters yes baptist head hunters i know it is it is it is one of the most remarkable places i have ever traveled and also one of the most amazing there's the spectacle of watching tens to hundreds of thousands of amwar falcons rising up out of their out of their nocturnal roosts is something that in a lifetime of hawk watching um some of the some of the the largest um hawk migration concentrations in the world like veracruz and mexico um don't hold a candle to what i saw in nagaland it was really one of one of the single most moving things as a bird watcher that i've ever experienced but it raised that question of you know was this the right thing for the people of pang tea and the surrounding communities to do well i mean certainly from a conservation perspective it was um you know the the amway falcons would have disappeared within a decade or two with that level of of killing but you know the thing about the the falcon slaughter as awful as it was is it was very egalitarian every one of the 500 or so households in the village of pente benefited financially in some fashion from that from that from that hunt whereas today the new tourism economy for falcons there's very definite winners and losers um for example um this is um intromul was a former trapper he gave up the money that he got from trapping which paid for his kids school fees including sending his kids to boarding schools in in the city when they were once they go past the elementary grades because it's the only way for them to get any kind of any kind of secondary education

2021-09-06 19:09

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