Coffee Talk
February 25, 2009
Robert Rice and Russ Greenberg gave a presentation about Bird Friendly® coffee at the Bedford Environmental Summit. This community-based grassroots meeting attracted almost 1,000 people and was an excellent forum for interested people and organizations in New York and Connecticut where The Birds and The Beans Initiative is being launched to promote Bird Friendly® coffee.
They also met with leaders of Connecticut Audubon to work on ways of promoting Bird Friendly® certified coffee to birders in New England. Also, Russ Greenberg was interviewed on the Ray Brown Birding radio talk show.
Songbird Travel Itinerary
February 19, 2009
Until very recently, scientists had little idea about the actual route that migratory songbirds take on their yearly sojourns. They knew the general areas where birds nest, pass through on migration, and spend the winter. But for an individual bird, the exact time they leave to migrate, how long it takes them to migrate, and the exact locations they stop were a complete mystery.
All this changed when Bridget Stutchbury, a research associate with the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, recently published an article in Science magazine describing her pioneering efforts to spy on wood thrushes and purple martins.
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Purple martin (left) by Richard Stade, and wood thrush (right) by Gerhard Hofmann
She used geolocators, tiny mechanical devices attached with a harness to the bird’s back, to track their locations much as a GPS unit does.
Last summer, Pete Marra attached geolocators to bobolinks in Vermont and seaside sparrows in Delaware. Stay tuned as the results of the study should be available this summer. In addition, this summer he will be putting geolocators on the rare Bicknell’s thrush and the wood thrush from across their breeding ranges.
More about these studies:
Ducks on an Icy Pond
February 5, 2009
George Jameson sent us this video of ducks congregating by the open water. How many different kinds of ducks can you see?
In cold weather, iced-over lakes and ponds force waterfowl to crowd into the few remaining areas with open water. Constant swimming can help keep the water’s surface from completely freezing over.
Many birds have no problem standing on ice. That is because their veins and arteries are very close to each other in their legs. Hot blood from the body cools down as it goes to the feet, so the feet won’t melt the ice. And the cold blood returning to the body gets warmed by the blood leaving the body and helps the bird’s body stay warm.
Mallards are the most common ducks in the video but you can also see American wigeon, wood duck, redhead, gadwall, bufflehead, and ring-necked duck.
The “rubby ducky” noises you hear are made by the American wigeon.
Did you find them all?
