RARITY FOCUS

In this Birding Community E-bulletin, we have three news items from California, and the first concerns a mega-rarity.

Slate-throated Redstart is a warbler that normally ranges from the foothills of north/central Mexico, southward to Bolivia. So, when a Slate-throated Redstart was found at Pine Lake Park in San Francisco, California, on 29 July, it was a real surprise.

There have been previous records in the U.S. - mostly in spring - from near-border locations in southeastern Arizona, southeastern New Mexico, as well as both west and south Texas. But this bird was a remarkable and surprising first for California, especially as it appeared so far north, in San Francisco. Additionally, where birder Dominik Mosur found the bird, Pine Lake Park, is simply a very modest 30-acre park located in southwest San Francisco.

The nearest Slate-throated Redstart populations in Mexico are migratory, and accordingly those birds found in the U.S. may mostly represent spring overshoots. The very first record for this species in the U.S. was in April 1962 in New Mexico, with none in the U.S. in the 1970s, a couple in the 1970s, none in the 1980s, perhaps four in the 1990s, and maybe a dozen since. Birders afield in spring and early summer across much of the West should certainly be on the lookout for this species.

This particular individual remained in Pine Lake Park throughout August, often in the willows or eucalyptus trees, delighting the many birders who came to see it.

Here is a photo by Mark Schulis from the day of discovery:

https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/621992073

And here is a detailed story concerning the bird, its discovery, and the attention it’s been receiving:

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/rare-bird-sighting-san-francisco-california-19621732.php

   as was a short ABC-7 TV report from the area:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/tripideas/rare-slate-throated-redstart-spotted-at-park-near-stern-grove-in-san-francisco/ar-AA1oqMqR?ocid=BingNewsSerp

BURROWING OWL CONCERNS

Burrowing Owl populations have been declining for many years, owing mostly to habitat loss. The owls normally live in wide-open, sparsely vegetated areas such as prairies, deserts, grasslands, and some agricultural fields. The birds are often associated with prairie-dog towns because of the utility of their burrows as nesting sites. Unfortunately, developers also view many of these habitats as appropriate for housing developments, condos, and golf courses.

Declines in Burrowing Owls have been particularly sharp in Florida, the Dakotas, and coastal California. They are listed as Endangered in Minnesota, Threatened in Colorado and Florida, and a Species of Concern in California, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. In Canada, Burrowing Owls are federally protected under the Species At Risk Act (SARA) and are listed as Endangered in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia.

Your editors may have missed one or two states or provinces and formal levels of threat, because the conservation scene is constantly shifting. Part of this shifting scene involves the following news item in California.

Last month, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife recommended that state wildlife policymakers consider a petition to list the Burrowing Owl as Endangered or Threatened under the state’s Endangered Species Act.

Two decades ago, when the concern was previously submitted to officials, it was thought that the owls in existing population strongholds could simply fly to other locations in the state and possibly boost dwindling populations.

It didn’t happen.

Current petitioners include the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Burrowing Owl Preservation Society, Urban Bird Foundation, Central Valley Bird Club, and the San Bernardino Valley and Santa Clara Valley Audubon societies. These and other groups expect the state’s Fish and Game Commission to vote on whether to accept the petition on 10 October. The Commission might opt to list some populations, or none, or go statewide, prompting a 12-18-month status review.

Regardless, this problem is apparently not going to disappear.

You can find out more on the California scene in an article that originally appeared in The Los Angeles Times:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-renewed-bid-to-protect-burrowing-owls-is-advancing-what-changed/ar-BB1r4QaY?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=LCTS&cvid=a79a4df8dc3446329504c4c379ae6da5&ei=33

BOOK NOTE: BACKYARD LEARING AND JOY 

Here’s yet another California story, this time with a short book review.

You may know author Amy Tan for The Joy Luck Club — a fine novel about Chinese immigrant families in San Francisco — and other works, but her recent book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024) might be closer to the mark for at least some readers of this Birding Community E-bulletin.

Best-selling author Amy Tan didn't set out to create a book when she started her personal journaling about birds in early 2016. She did feel gloomy over the state of the world however, and she was trying to find some solace in backyard nature at her home in Sausalito, California, by writing notes about birds and simultaneously drawing them.

Her personal experience overlapped with the Covid-19 pandemic – and coincidental with the national lockdown along and a national boom in backyard bird feeding. The short essays and accompanying artwork which make up this book start in mid-September 2017 and end in mid-December 2022. Thankfully, Tan’s personal nature journaling evolved into this publishable chronicle when her editor encouraged her to shape her nine personal journals into a public format.

When she started her backyard bird watching experience, Tan could only identify three bird species in her backyard. What evolved was the unfolding of a proficient feeder-watcher and a creative bird-artist. Her first written encounter in September 2017 – feeding a hummingbird by hand – altered her life and introduced her to “an obsession.”

What follows in the book are various encounters with different bird species and their unique behaviors at her feeding station, different foods preferred by birds (e.g., sunflower seeds, suet, sugar-water, nyjer, and mealworms) and their individual presentations, ever-present visiting squirrels, occasional visiting rats, a cat problem, birdbath adventures, illness and death outside her window, and much more which became part of her backyard attentiveness and bird-oriented “decent into madness.”

Tan’s concern and interest sometimes slips into a self-admitted and playful anthropomorphism, but it’s all part of her dealing with the revelations in her backyard. All the while, her discoveries are accompanied by 132 of her drawings, sketches, and color illustrations. It is instructive and even delightful to follow this skilled writer evolving into an adept bird observer and capable illustrator.

At the same time, one wonders how many other Americans – less creative but perhaps almost as driven – went through a parallel backyard experience during the Covid pandemic?

IBA NEWS: DEVEAUX BANK IN SOUTH CAROLINA

Deveaux Bank is a relatively small - perhaps 220-acre – horseshoe-shaped-shifting barrier and sandspit island at the mouth of the North Edisto River estuary in South Carolina. It is located about 24 miles southwest of Charleston and is protected under the jurisdiction of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.

The site is one of the most significant waterbird and shorebird nesting areas in South Carolina. It contains one of the largest Brown Pelican rookeries in the state, and is of particular importance due to the paucity of suitable nesting areas in South Carolina. It has an Important Bird Area (IBA) designation and is regarded as an IBA site of Global Significance.

This summer, Deveaux Bank received the added designation as a Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network (WHSRN) site due to its status as the most significant known nocturnal roost of migrating Whimbrels in the Americas. Indeed, between 2019 and 2022, a series of nocturnal surveys during spring migration revealed at least 19,485 roosting Whimbrels during peak migration, representing no less than 25% of the entire North American population and probably half the population on the Atlantic coast.

The site may also be of significance for the Red Knot (rufa population), perhaps serving as a stopover site for 10% or more of this biographical population. More details on Red Knot numbers at the site would be helpful.

Deveaux Bank has now become the latest WHSRN site of International Importance, the 50th WHSRN site in the U.S., and the 124th in the Americas, adding another level of attention to this significant IBA.

For more details on Deveaux Bank in general, see here:

https://www.dnr.sc.gov/birdsanctuaries/deveauxbank.html

 and here is a video on the Whimbrel number discovery:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSr6V3VDgFo

And for the designation of this latest WHSRN site, see details here:

https://whsrn.org/deveaux-bank-the-50th-whsrn-site-of-the-united-states-and-124th-in-the-hemisphere/

For additional information about worldwide IBA programs, including those in the U.S., check the National Audubon Society's Important Bird Area program web site at:

https://www.audubon.org/important-bird-areas

TIP OF THE MONTH: SHOREBIRD COUNTING

While on the subject of shorebirds, this is a good opportunity to remind readers of activities around the “Global Shorebird Count” and “World Shorebird Day.” This is not only an opportunity to celebrate the incredible migration phenomenon involving shorebirds, but also a way to promote the research, monitoring, and conservation of this amazing group of birds.

The Count runs from 2 to 8 September, and the Day itself is celebrated on 6 September.

For general information and how to participate in World Shorebird Day and the Global Shorebird Count, see here:

https://www.worldshorebirdsday.org/global-shorebird-counts

  and to find out more, with an emphasis on WHSRN sites, (many of which in the U.S. are National Wildlife Refuges), see here:

https://whsrn.org/site-support/big-day-at-whsrn-sites/

REVISITING THE SOUTH-ASIAN VULTURE CRASH

As far back as 2006, we reported in the Birding Community E-bulletin about the decline of vultures in south Asia. This decline was the result of the increased use of diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug inappropriately used on cattle. Diclofenac was toxic to any vulture that might have fed on the carcass of any recently treated and non-recovered bovine.

Despite recent regional bans on this application of diclofenac in India, Pakistan, and Nepal, three species of southern Asia’s vultures continue to be severely threatened. All three species – White-rumped, Indian, and Slender-billed – exhibited declines of over 97% since the early 1990s.

Now, the human-impact of this vulture loss has been examined, broadly reported in a study last month - “The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence from the Decline of Vultures in India”- in The American Economic Review.

In case you missed it, here’s the gist of the message:

Where there are rotting livestock carcasses - no longer picked to the bones by vultures - polluted waterways and roaming or feral dogs (with disease) will increase. In the absence of vultures feasting on available carcasses, there has been a “really huge negative sanitation shock,” according to Anant Sudarshan, one of the study’s authors and an economics professor at the University of Warwick in England.

Economists have now put a disturbing figure on the unintended consequences of the vulture near-collapse, revealing just how important these birds can be. The dramatic decline in vultures in India has led to “increased human mortality by over 4% because of a large negative shock to sanitation.” According to the researchers, that added up to more than half a million excess human deaths between 2000 and 2005.

See the sobering details here:

https://www.science.org/content/article/loss-india-s-vultures-may-have-led-deaths-half-million-people

   and here:

https://www.sciencealert.com/shift-in-indias-vulture-population-linked-to-half-a-million-human-deaths

AUDUBON WOES

Things have gotten uncomfortable at the National Audubon Society in the last few years in the face of a trio of perplexing problems.

First: Concerns arose in late 2020 when two-thirds of respondents in an internal staff survey agreed that the organization did not “create an environment where diverse staff can thrive,” and two-fifths pointed to efforts to “stall, de-prioritize or ignore” concerns that would promote equity, diversity and inclusion. Two key diversity and inclusion officers then resigned, and within a few months David Yarnold, the National Audubon president and CEO, stepped down under a “mutual agreement.” See here:

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/20/audubon-ceo-resigns-483569

Second: Things were looking better when in the spring of 2021 a new CEO, Dr. Elizabeth Gray, was installed - first temporarily – as the new National Audubon leader. The calm was interrupted with a new controversy over organizational identification with its namesake – John James Audubon – whose role as a slave-owner created another internal controversy. After a yearlong deliberation, the board of directors decided to keep the Audubon name, a decision which resulted in three board members resigning in protest and about half a dozen Audubon chapters fairly quickly and independently changing their names. See here:      

https://www.opb.org/article/2023/03/18/audubon-faces-a-backlash-after-deciding-to-keep-name-that-evokes-racist-enslaver/

Third: Connected in part with the first problem described employees at NAS successfully organized a union in late 2021, affiliating with the Communication Workers of America (CWA). Their “Bird Union-CWA Local 1180” was recognized under the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and negotiations with National Audubon were held intermittently for over two years, mostly stuck over disputes on pay and benefits. Meanwhile, the NLRB found National Audubon in violation of federal labor law multiple times. And last month, employees even voted overwhelmingly to authorize a possible three-day strike early this month if National Audubon did not move on outstanding issues. See here:

https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/national-audubon-society-charged-breaking-labor-laws-discriminating-against-union

   and here:

https://coloradosun.com/2024/08/22/colorado-national-audubon-strike-support/

Concerned NAS members and other observers are encouraging Dr. Gray and her authorized representatives to do more to resolve these issues. Surely, National Audubon doesn’t need additional problems. Petitions have also been circulating, supporting a fair contract resolution, “integral not only to the bird conservation, science, advocacy, and education work… but also to the overall success and reputation of the National Audubon Society.” See here:

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/tell-audubon-leadership-fair-contract-now

LAST WORD

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