A poor choice of background sounds for a scene taking place in the California desert (Common loon by John Cassady)
I am sure that everyone is enthralled with learning how the mind of the blogger works- what are the steps that lead to a given post. Well today (Saturday March 6), I started out on a post about red-tailed hawks, three of which came to my attention this week in interesting circumstances. As I began a little research, I learned that their calls are used in movies more than any other raptor, regardless of which bird is actually being shown on screen (imagine an avian Mel Blanc or Gilbert Gottfried). In sharing that tidbit with Cindy, she reminded me that tomorrow was the Academy Awards night and I ought to do a post on birds and movies. Voila!
The more you know about a subject the more critical you can be of popular portrayals of it. I liked the movie “The Verdict” very much except for one thing: Paul Newman rejects a large settlement offer without consulting his clients! He may be doing it for principles but the poor shmoes he is trying to help might well have preferred the principal. He should have been disciplined if not disbarred.
Most of my beefs though have been natural history related. Michael Cimino made one acclaimed movie called “The Deer Hunter”, an examination of the effects that the Vietnam War had on some of its participants. It is filled with grim imagery and heart wrenching scenes. My companion was in tears. Then the screen flashes to some of the protagonists hunting deer above snowline in the mountains of Pennsylvania (a red flag right there). All of a sudden there appears a magnificent buck- lovely picture. Except that the deer is a European roe deer, not a native white-tailed. I was wrenched from the movie-induced melancholy and flung into animation: “But it is a roe deer! It is a roe deer!” (As for my friend, let us just say she was courteous.)
One of the best movies I have seen in recent years was the poorly distributed and bleak “The Dead Girl” (2006). (Not be confused with “Dead Girl”, released two years later.) Directed by Karen Moncreiff, it received a little attention over the past month or two when leading lady Brittany Murphy moved from being a dead girl in reel life to a dead girl in real life, such as it is. Anyway, two socially inept young people wind up the evening in the California desert where they are serenaded by the calls of common loons! Given the overall feel of the film, the creepiness of certain native owls would have worked much better artistically, as well.
PBS some years ago aired a magisterial production on the history of the Jewish people, backed by the dulcet tones of Abba Eban. A dhow plying the waters of the upper Nile- wait can that be? Yep, there is a singing mourning warbler! And then there is an early scene in of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” where the tropical jungle comes alive with the truly wacky sounds of the willow ptarmigan. I can also think of numerous occasions of cockatoos appearing in South America and macaws in Africa, and old world vultures showing up in the American west. And when an actual turkey vulture is shown soaring overhead, the sound is that of a red-tailed hawk. (Really, when was the last time you heard a turkey vulture?)
Cindy says that I ought to end this with a warning: Don’t accompany me to a movie that features characters out of doors. (Some of the movies we have enjoyed together include “My Dinner With Andre,” “Das Boot,” and “Saw.”) But please send me your favorite feathered film faux pas. I promise to share them.
Have a nice Oscar night.
Tags: "Deer Hunter", Academy Awards, common loon, Karen Moncreiff, Michael Cimino, movies, Oscar night, willow ptarmigan
Blogger by Cessna (photo by Phil Miller)
We have hit March, yet little suggests that we are not still in deep winter. One’s mind can escape by either heading farther north or slinking south. This is in the way of passenger pigeons- you ignore the date and aim for the forage. So this week’s blog will tell of a trip I made a year ago, almost to the week, to northern Wisconsin to see gray wolves from an airplane. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) allows writers to join their pilots as they make wolf surveys. The north woods seemed pretty birdless on that trip but we did have a few flocks of crossbills and there were of course ravens.
Siren, Wisconsin is in Burnett County, about 25 miles west of Spooner. It has one of three airports in the state where the WDNR maintains hangars for its teams of pilots and fleet of aircraft. I arrived about 8:30 in the morning and my pilot was waiting. Phil Miller has been with WDNR since 1993, and before that flew relief missions into Mozambique and Sudan for three years, when civil war prevented goods from moving on the ground. (Phil said one thing the pilots learned quickly was not to circle in one place long enough for guerilla forces to get a bead on the planes.)
Phil said that current weather conditions would aid our efforts at seeing wolves. We had a high cloud cover that eliminated shadows that might have concealed wolves on a sunny day. Not so good was the melt that had occurred a few days before that marred the snowy ground with dark patches of vegetation that might resemble wolves from the air.
Our goal was to cover portions of Bayfield and Douglas Counties, as we searched for 14 or 15 packs, each with one radio collared animal. Each wing of the Cessna 180 had a set of antennae. “When I hear a signal, I will circle to determine from what direction it is loudest,” explained Miller. We ascended to a traveling height of 1,000 feet and moved at a speed of about 120 miles per hour. The earth below us was an almost monochromatic mosaic of marsh, upright skeletons of leafless hardwoods, dark almost sinister tracts of conifers, and the smooth hard circles and ribbons of frozen water.
In fairly short order, Miller picked up our first wolf signal, from animal #564. He determined it was in a dense area of hardwoods and that we weren’t likely to see it. But we had much greater success with wolf #602 and her pack of 5. Miller spied four wolves hunkered under some pines. On the second pass, I saw one wolf running. A third pass revealed another animal slowly walking.
The next wolf we picked up was #634, a female which weighed 75 pounds when she was collared in June of 2008. Phil saw the animal curled up in the snow, but on his second pass he thought it might be a deer. Fortunately, on our third try the wolf stood up and removed all doubt. It had conspicuous white markings on its face.
While following the signal of #520 we crossed the border into Minnesota. On the crystalline surface of a beaver pond we saw the highlight of an already remarkable day. A large blotch of crimson marked the spot where a deer had been killed. Nearby, another smaller mass of color denoted its evisceration. Two bloody drag marks led to what was left of the carcass, guarded by two wolves that busied themselves chasing away a flock of scavenging ravens. (Phil took a shot of this which I am including; the other two aerial shots were by other pilots on other days. I was particulalry amazed by the picture of the black bear hibernating in the bald eagle nest. You would think it would be drafty!)
A wolf chasing ravens from its kill (photo by Phil Miller, courtesy of WDNR)
Gray wolf (photo courtesy WDNR).
Black bear hibernating in bald eagle nest (photo courtesy of WDNR)
Tags: birdzilla.com, black bear, gray wolf, Joel Greenberg, north woods, predators, raven, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
Greater flamingo, one of a small group of birds, along with pigeons, that produces a milk-like substance that they feed to chicks. (Photo by Michael Nichols)
This starts out somewhat convoluted. Last fall during a field trip, my camera was left in the car of a couple who live on the north side of Chicago. They further indicated that there was no place they could leave the camera at their residence so that I could pick it up during the day. One of them works at the Field Museum. I then thought of Doug Stotz, an ornithologist at the museum who does not live far from me. He was willing to be the go between: he would obtain the camera, take it home, and leave it behind some plants on his front porch. When I went to pick it up, a car in the driveway revealed that either Doug or his wife, Francie Muraski-Stotz, was home. I had met Francie a few times but did not really know her. I saw the camera but decided to knock on the door to say hello. Francie answered and we started chatting. It is rare for me to go very many minutes into a conversation without bringing up ppigeons. I told her that I was hoping to get the Field Museum interested in featuring an exhibit on the bird as the century anniversary of the species’ extinction approaches. She told me that she used to work in the museum’s exhibit department and she liked the passenger pigeon idea. And thus began our collaboration on a proposal to the museum. After several get-togethers and various delays, we were ready to present our proposal. People were out of town over the holidays, and we cancelled one appointment due to bad weather, so last Thursday was the day we were to meet with the exhibit people.
Francie must know a million people at the museum. From the minute we entered the building she was encountering friends she had not seen for awhile. But we deliberately arrived early in part to say hello to folks (I never did get to see friends in the fish and herps departments) and wound up having lunch with folks from the bird department. (Doug is in Peru) I find such gatherings to be inspiring- it is a great privilege to listen to world class ornithologists talk about birds. I am thankful that I live in a region that can support institutions like the Field Museum.
The group Francie and I had lunch with consisted of people I have known for a long while. There was Dave Willard (collection manager), John Bates (head of zoology department), Jason Wechstein (an authority on bird parasites), Josh Engle (new employee of the museum although he still leads occasional bird tours), and Nick Block (graduate student at U of Chicago, studying evolution of Madagascar birds). Passenger pigeons came up (duh!) and it was a great opportunity for me to ask some questions. Pigeons produce a substance known as pigeon milk (aka “esophageal fluids.”). This is a viscous material resembling loose rice pudding or cottage cheese that originates in the crop of the bird. The crop is a pouch-like growth near the throat that holds food. In pigeons, the lining sloughs off to produce the highly nutritious milk that spurs rapid growth of the young over the first several days of life. Later, the milk is mixed with adult food. (With respect to passenger pigeons, if the milk-laden squabs should fall or get pushed by the myriad of hunters seeking them, they would often splat upon impact with the ground). My question was: are pigeons the only birds that produce that milk? It turns out that emperor penguins and flamingoes also produce this kind of milk.
A more difficult issue involves how birds communicate with each other. How could all or most of the continent’s passenger pigeons gather in the same handful of places to nest? How did birds wintering in Kentucky know that the big mast year was in Pennsylvania this year and Michigan the next? The Old Timers thought the pigeons sent scouts in expeditions up to several hundred birds to find where the mast was in early spring and then would return with the information to pigeons on wintering territory. A.W. Schorger (author of the 1955 book Passenger Pigeon: Its Natural History and Extinction) rejected this, believing instead that in the fall movements south some flocks would encounter mast-rich areas and convey that information in the course of interacting with other migrating or wintering flocks. Even how that mechanism would work is not clear to me except birds headed to a specific destination might move in a more deliberate way that would prompt other birds to follow. But that leaves questions too (enough mast for one flock might not be for five). The Field Museum folks did not really have an answer but noted other examples of where the sudden appearance of food would soon draw lots of birds. John Bates cited a particular species in Costa Rica that was thought to be very rare. He arrived at an area within their range at a time when bamboo was in bloom and the birds were abundant. Later, nests were found. They did give me some names of people studying these questions.
After the prolonged and pleasant conversation, Francie and I headed towards our meeting with the exhibition staff. Although Francie was familiar with the dynamics, I learned a lot. Large exhibits of any kind are risky ventures because they are very expensive to produce or even display and thus have to draw patrons willing to pay extra to see them. And even if an exhibit is successful in one city doesn’t mean it will be in another (The Darwin exhibit was a hit in London but proved much less popular in Chicago). The exhibit people indicated that they would be much more likely to host a smaller exhibit should one be available. They provided us with contacts and other information to help make that possible. I will keep you posted.
Tags: earth quake, Illinois, westmont
Louis Agassiz Fuertes' portrait of passenger pigeons and mourning doves.
The world of folklore is fascinating and provides an interesting lens through which to observe the events around us. Spouse Cindy Kerchmar, who has a graduate degree in the field and was a practitioner for a while, introduced me to the discipline and I now keep my eyes open for examples. I find it pretty exciting to discover them, especially if they involve birds and natural history. And with the internet full of folk and faux lore, I don’t even have to leave the house to pursue these gems (unlike rare birds which do require leaving the house- a good thing to keep in mind should one be an agoraphobe looking for a hobby).
Folk lore represents the informal knowledge of a culture- it is generally passed along through unwritten modes, such as music, story telling, drawing, and the like. And now in the digital age, the internet performs these tasks too, but because of its reach and the sheer quantity of words it carries, dissemination is both quicker and more pervasive. One modern subset of folklore is the urban legend, made famous by the works of the scholar Jan Harold Brunvand. These are common characteristics of the urban legend from the web site About.com:
- It’s a narrative.
- It’s alleged to be true.
- It’s just plausible (sometimes just barely plausible) enough to be believed.
- Its veracity is unproven.
- It’s of spontaneous (or indeterminate) origin.
- It varies in the telling.
- It’s likely to take the form of a cautionary tale.
- It circulates by being passed from individual to individual, either orally or in written form (e.g., via fax, photocopy or email).
- It’s attributed to putatively trustworthy secondhand sources (e.g., “a friend of a friend,” “my sister’s accountant,” etc.).
Just two weeks ago an acquaintance in my bird club sent this slide show entitled “The Rebirth of the Eagle.” It is a collection of slides and text featuring mostly bald eagles. It is hardly worth analyzing slide by slide because every statement about the birds is wrong and often silly. Even if you knew nothing about eagles, a little thought would make it clear that it is all nonsense. The assertion is made that at around the age of thirty “the eagle” becomes unable to hunt and fly: its talons become inflexible, its beak straightens and shrinks, and “its old-aged and heavy wings, due to their feathers, become stuck to its chest.” The bird at that point has a tough decision to make- either die or fly to its nest in the mountains to undergo “a painful process of change that lasts 150 days.” Opting for life means flying to its montane nest where it bangs its beak on the rocks until it can “pluck it out.” Then while a new beak begins to grow, it somehow manages to “pluck” out the talons. (When you consider all the feathers that have to go as well, the birds engage in a regular pluck fest.) And the point of all this is to demonstrate how we as humans must also adapt to changes if we are to survive.
I will pick just three items. First, all the photos are of adult bald eagles until we get to the one illustrating the claim that the eagle’s bill becomes straighter and shorter as it ages. That eagle is a golden, which of course lacks the massive bill of the bald. An eagle opting for change flies to its nest in the mountains. A map of the breeding range of the bald eagle demonstrates that much of it includes mountain free territory. (What is an ambitious bald eagle to do?) And finally, there remains the final combination of events: a bird “plucks” out its beak by smashing it on rocks, plucks out its claws, and then sits for five months without any sustenance. Given the innocuous and incontrovertible moral, I wonder why it was necessary to make this all up. I e-mailed the address given on the slide but it was returned. About.com says the slide presentation has been around since at least 2007.
Another bird related urban legend, and one that I like better, concerns, what else, passenger pigeons. I first came upon it in an article from the publication of the Pennsylvania rural electric cooperative. I love obscure sources and when I began reading the article I came across a story concerning a nesting of 250,000 passenger pigeons near Bowling Green, Ohio in 1896. Hunters killed all but 5,000 birds. Those that died were processed and packed in barrels for rail transport. Unfortunately, however, the train derailed and all 245,000 birds spoiled and had to be discarded. Never having encountered this tale before, I e-mailed the magazine asking for sources and soon heard back from the author. He sent me several web-site addresses where the anecdote is repeated. But no references appear anywhere! A book on endangered and extinct wildlife published in New Delhi also has the story but apparently the only library in North America that has this volume is McGill University in Montreal and it was not available through inter-library loan. But enough of the book is on line to see that it contains no notes or bibliography.
This is far more subtle because you do need to know something about passenger pigeons. First, the last wild bird is generally considered to have been collected in Ohio in 1900. There were likely a few birds thereafter but not many: there were certainly not 250,000 in 1896. Second, the number of dead birds is too precise (and too high a percentage of the total) to be plausible. Third, the event escaped the knowledge of every historian and ornithologist who has ever written about the species. Such an event would have made big news at the time. And finally, it is just too neat a story that all the dead birds were wasted. This story then becomes a classic type of folklore known as the “cautionary tale.” You should never have slaughtered the birds in the first place. The amazing thing to me, though, is that people are still making stuff up about a bird that has been extinct for nearly a century.
If any of you, dear readers, know of any other bird or natural history urban legends or other types of folk lore please share.
Tags: eagles, folklore, urban legends
Before (on left) and after (on right) photos showing the effects wrought by the earth quake.
On February 10 at 4am, an earthquake measuring 3.8 on the Richter scale rocked (ok nudged) the Chicago region. It was horrifying: I was laying awake in my chair thinking about passenger pigeons when I felt the house shake once. When I turned on the radio an hour later, I learned what had happened. For the rest of the day, I waited for a United Nations presence, as I have always wanted to taste the high protein gruel they dole out during disasters (you know, the stuff the flies avoid). I figured that depending on whether I wanted to go sweet or savory, enough butter, cream, raspberry balsamic vinegar, curry powder, dark chocolate, walnut oil, or other flavorings would make it palatable. But they never showed. So I ordered a pizza, only to learn that the cook forgot to put the mushrooms on. Living through a nightmare like that, though, sure emphasizes how fragile life is and makes you thankful for all the things you do have. I don’t even want to think about it anymore.
Crested coua photographed by Josh Engel of Tropical Birding.
Last week, Josh Engel gave a dynamite talk on the natural history of Madagascar to the Evanston North Shore Bird Club. (As program chairman, I was amazed that 70 people turned out. I usually have to bribe people with food to get that kind of crowd.) As I heard Josh talk, I could not help but think of my own visit there in October 1987 with Phoebe Snetsinger. Some things have changed and some have not.
The most important emphasis must be on what has not changed: Madagascar remains a remarkable destination for anyone who loves nature. Something like 85% of all the species (that is an aggregate of all taxa) that are native occur no where else in the world. It is the fourth largest island in the world, having broken off from the Indian sub-continent some 80-100 million years ago. The long isolation has led to the extraordinary degree of endemism. Another way to express this is that the country hosts 5% of all the planet’s plant and animal species.
What is, in my mind, more amazing still are the biogeographic anomalies. For example, Madagascar has a boa constrictor, a snake that is otherwise an exclusive inhabitant of the Western Hemisphere. The tour I was with actually saw one. Another strange group of animals which we did not see is the tenrec or Madagascar hedgehog, of which there are about twenty species. Their closest relatives are the solendons (there are two species, one of which is paradoxus ). These bizarre looking critters are restricted to Cuba and Hispaniola.
Back in 1987 there had been only two recent bird extinctions: the snail eating coua which lived on a small island off-shore and the Madagascar pochard last noted in 1970. Two other species, the red owl and serpent eagle, were so rare their status was unknown. The last record for the owl had been something like fifty years before and in “deep forest reached by a 50 km hike west of Perinet.” (I told the group leader, that no matter what else we saw, I would be disappointed if we missed the red owl.) Josh showed us slides of massive deforestation going on in much of the country, yet there have been no new avian extinctions and the red owl and serpent eagle have been rediscovered. Further, it turns out that a tiny population of pochards has been recently found in a previously unexplored lake. At some point it would seem inevitable that loss of habitat will lead to extinctions but apparently there is enough left to support just about everything known to have ever been there. And increased scientific scrutiny leads to new discoveries on a regular basis.
So most if not all of the wildlife that was there in 1987 remains and much of it is easier to access, as tourism has grown over the decades. Twenty-three years ago Air Madagascar consisted of three planes leased from Air France. When I was there the president of the country decided he needed one, thereby reducing the total fleet by a third. This meant that we had to fly into the capital Antananarivo (Tana) every time we were shifting to a different part of the country. So in other words, from Tana to Berenty in the south, back to Tana. Then to Fort Dauphin in the north and back to Tana etc. There were only two hotels in the capital that catered to westerners- Hotel Colbert for French speakers and the Hilton for English speakers. Josh tells me that the number has now grown to about six and the Hilton is now the Carlton.
Sickle-billed vanga photographed by Josh Engel of Tropical Birding.
After landing in Tana, our first destination was a wonderful place called Ankarafantsika. Unfortunately, between necessary errands and bad roads, we did not arrive until late afternoon. But even at that less than optimal time of the day, the reserve was mesmerizing. I photographed a Van Dam’s vanga on the nest, which our leader said might be the first such photograph ever taken. (Vangas are a family related to shrikes that are endemic to Madagascar.) The sickle-billed vanga, which sounds like a baby crying, was easily found as it played woodpecker with its outsized beak. And then there were all the chameleons and lemurs: on our very first excursion I was seeing the treasures I had been reading about for years. It is one thing for a place to host exotic creatures; it is another to actually see them on your first leisurely stroll.
Ankarafantsika dripped treasure wherever we looked, so it was obvious we needed to spend the night to even sample what was present. The only two accommodation options were tents or a brothel. Now, I harbor no illusions here- a rural brothel in a desperately poor country would probably be indescribably depressing, but I thought it would make for a great story. In the end, Phoebe Snetsinger (this was her first trip to Madagascar and she had a spirit of adventure second to none) and I were outvoted by our more pragmatic compatriots. I wound up spending the night awake in my tent, anyway, attending to my camera. So it is likely that neither venue would have allowed much sleep, and I will concede that the nocturnal chorus of the forest is undoubtedly more edifying than the alternative. Josh informs me that there are now guest houses at Ankarafantsika so the consideration of off site lodging is no longer even necessary.
Two other highlights of the trip involved lemurs. At Berenty, on the south, ring-tailed lemurs have become so habituated to people they will run up your tripod. Being so close to wild animals, when such proximity provokes no alarm in either species, is always a rare treat. And at the end of our trip we visited the rain forest at Perinet, in the northeast of the country. The haunting visage of the forest, enveloped by heavy cloaks of fog, would have been special even in silence. But the screams of indri transformed the scene into something only remotely related to the world I knew. Try to imagine hump-backed whales singing in the muted light of a forest at dawn. It is not easy.
Indri photographed by Keith Barnes of Tropical Birding.
Ring-tailed lemur at Berenty photographed by Keith Barnes of Tropical Birding.
Snowy owl photographed by John Cassady.
When I started blogging last May, I feared that inevitable moment when nothing I had done over the week warranted a blog posting. I knew this would arrive sometime in the winter and by golly here we are. I have been working almost exclusively on my passenger pigeon book the past month, which limits being outside anyway. I told Andy Sigler I had to go out in the field, and his response was that everyone feels that way, but when they spend all day in problematic weather and don’t see anything worthwhile, they regret having made the effort. (It is good having such supportive friends.)
So far this winter has been marked by absences. I have commented before that the white-winged crossbills last year kept a lot of folks entertained for months. Kelly McKay told me one was seen this past December on a Christmas count in northwest Illinois, but otherwise I have not heard of any winter finches except a handful of pine siskins at a feeder near Waukegan. Then there are always the bald eagles on the Mississippi River. Not real close, but a few hour drive to see hundreds of these magnificent birds is worth doing at least once a winter. This year, though, people have been lamenting the low numbers.
Up until a few years ago there would usually be a snowy owl or two on the lakefront. Indeed, every snowy owl I had ever seen was on the shores of big water- either Humboldt Bay in northern California, Lake Michigan, Lake Calumet, or Lake Superior. But most recently the snowy owls have lingered inland. Two winters ago, I was minding my own business on the computer when I checked IBET (the Illinois birders listserve) to discover that a snowy owl was perched on the roof of a religious tract store in a shopping center five minutes from me. After hunting for it a bit, I spotted the bird on the ledge of an apartment building. Several people managed to see it, but unfortunately not Andy, for whom it would have been a county bird. But here we are at the beginning of February and nary a snowy owl anywhere.
One winter the hot bird that kept people excited was a gray colored gyrfalcon that Cindy Alberico found in LaSalle County, Illinois. The bird foraged on waterfowl drawn to the area by a nuclear power plant cooling lake. It would be a state bird for me so I drove down five times. On my second to last excursion I pulled into the open parking lot by the cooling lake and began scanning the dike that surrounds the water. In a little while, an official utility truck pulled up and a man emerged with an automatic rifle. He informed me that I was trespassing. I suppose I could have responded by singing the famous Woody Guthrie song that explores property rights, but doubting the efficacy of that tact, I merely left. (Heavily armed men can afford to me insensitive to the nuances of folk music.)
The day proved bittersweet. The larger world recalls February 1, 2003 as the day the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded on its reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. (It was not a good time to be a rocket scientist, no matter how smart they are. But then the failures of brain surgeons rarely receive international attention.) I listened to NPR’s coverage of the disaster as I slowly cruised the nearly empty snow-covered roads. And then suddenly there it was, perched on a small mound in the middle of a wind-swept corn field. I jumped out of the car with the scope and had a very quick but adequate view of the gyr. I decided to walk across the frozen ground to get closer, but did not want to leave the car with its open windows and key in the ignition. I turned my head for a brief moment to extract the keys, and when I looked back into the scope the bird had vanished. I never saw it again. And for that matter, no one else did either.
![W.B. Mershon's personal rail car on a hunting expedition to North Dakota in the 1890s (Courtesy of Geneology Collection of Saginaw [Michigan] Public Library)](http://www.birdzilla.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/mershon-jpg.jpg "mershon jpg")
W.B. Mershon's personal rail car on a hunting expedition to North Dakota in the 1890s (Courtesy of Geneology Collection of Saginaw [Michigan
Earlier I wrote of my trip to Saginaw to examine the papers of William Butts Mershon, who among many other things was the first great historian of the passenger pigeon. He loved the out of doors, and pursued hunting and fishing with all the vast resources at his disposal. He was a self-admitted “game hog”, back in the day when few people knew any better. He bought a railroad car and took it on hunting trips; this photo depicts such an outing to North Dakota. (The photo is used with permission of the Public Libraries of Saginaw, MI, Local History and Genealogical Collection). But when it became clear that the profligate slaughter engaged in by “sportsmen” and market hunters alike was ridding the country of its wildlife, he became a passionate proponent of conservation measures. (In fact, many of those involved in the last-minute effort to save the passenger pigeons from extinction had a history of shooting them.)
Well it turns out that most of Mershon’s papers are not in Saginaw, but rather at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. (I accidentally learned that fact in the course of perusing a 1954 doctoral dissertation.) So that is where I headed recently. It only took me three and a half hours to get there, and the motel was only five minutes from the library.
One of the pleasures of this ppigeon project has been the people I have encountered in my searches for information. Don Gorney is a birding friend who lives in Indianapolis and likes the historical aspect of natural history. (Several weeks ago, I stayed at his home and he accompanied me to Bloomington, IN where we spent a day combing the files of Amos Butler, the father of Indiana ornithology.) It turns out his sister Terry is also a very accomplished genealogist and nature historian. She has provided me some excellent ppigeon accounts that she has unearthed in her research. I casually asked if she wanted to spend a day doing research in Ann Arbor (she lives in Ft. Wayne) and it turned out she was able to join me. So we were set to meet at the library when it opened on Monday morning.
The trip to Ann Arbor also provided the opportunity to meet a friend of longstanding whom I have not seen in well over a decade. Darlene Friedman, a birder who grew up on the north side of Chicago, is a veterinarian who lives about twenty miles from Ann Arbor. We met at my motel and then had dinner at a neat place called Zingerman’s, which at its roots is a Jewish deli but whose capacious shelves and coolers now hold numerous olive oils, cheeses, and other comestibles desired by today’s cosmopolitan gourmet.
Darlene has been an avid birder since I first met her in June 1973 (some day I will go into my spiel on the rarity of young female birders). She is a serious state lister but over the last couple of years has devoted a lot of effort to photography. That seems to be a common development among birders. Once you have seen just about all there is in your area, your emphasis changes. If you have the resources, you can chase birds all over the world. Or you go in the other direction and become a county lister like my friend Andy Sigler. Some folks are captivated by temporal lists, most particularly one’s annual total or big days. Especially with the forgiving medium of digital cameras, many like Darlene have become serious photographers. Another local birder, Donnie Dann, devotes a lot of his time to conservation issues. My birding has also changed over the decades. I have a greater interest in broader natural history and I obviously am enthralled by ecological changes, particularly those wrought by people.
The white-winged crossbill invasion last winter is a perfect example of how different birding orientations manifested themselves. Andy and his fellow county listers searched the internet, seeking the locations of central Illinois cemeteries- a land use type likely to have conifers, the required food of the crossbills. At one place, Andy and Mike Baum sat by a cemetery looking and listening for a good long while, and were ready to leave when Mike heard something fall from a tree. It was a chewed up cone, and further scanning yielded the crossbill. Darlene, on other hand, spent many hours in places that she knew hosted the crossbills and took many hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures, including the beauty that appears here.
Crane Creek in northwest Ohio is a location Darlene targets often, in that it affords wonderful opportunities to photograph the myriad of migrants that have given the site a national reputation. In fact, she laments the growing crowds of birders, who make effective photography more challenging. But you can see by the results, it remains a terrific spot. One evening was hardly enough to catch up on so many years, but we did resolve to keep in touch on a regular basis (hopefully, that will be more than my constant noodging for blog photos).
Bright and early Monday, I was in the parking lot of the Bentley Library waiting for it to open, when a car with IN plates pulled in next to me. It was Terry and we hit it off immediately. (Indeed, several times during the day, we were admonished (some what unfairly we, think) by librarians to keep our voices down) There were many boxes of Mershon’s material, which you order one at a time. Ten or so boxes contained “letter books”, an early attempt at making copies. As I understand it, typed letters were pressed onto special onion skin-like paper that held the writing. The other boxes contained other kinds of material, including letters sent to him. Terry started looking at the box that covered the years he began researching his 1907 ppigeon book. I began with the letter books, and despaired that it would take probably weeks to go through them all. But after a few hours, being the highly observant individual I am, I noticed lettered tabs at the end of the volume. Could it be? Yes, next to each tab were the names of the various people to whom he sent letters and the page on which it appeared. They were indexed! So what was going to take forever was now doable in hours.
The specific thing we were looking for was correspondence between Mershon and Henry B. Roney, the music teacher who visited the last great pigeon nesting in 1878 in Petoskey, MI in order to stop the killing. Both men lived in Saginaw at the time, and I strongly suspect Mershon helped finance Roney’s mission. Soon thereafter, however, Roney, moved to Chigago, where he worked as a music director for a large church and then organized his boy’s choir that traveled the world to great aclaim. I wondered if they kept in touch and whether Roney retained his interest in conservation. Terry hit pay dirt first- finding a letter from Roney, with its distinctive letterhead promoting the choir. A brief correspondence ensued, sparked by Mershon’s request for a copy of Roney’s article on the Petoskey nesting. I found a few letters that Mershon wrote, and was confident that by the following day I would have been able to complete the letterbooks (the other boxes, I was forgoing). Terry returned to Fort Wayne, and I headed back to the motel fully expecting to finish up the next day. Unfortunately, the threat of bad weather prompted me to cut my trip short. But another excursion is in the offiing.
White-winged crossbill photographed by Darlene Friedman.
American redstart at Crane Creek State Park (OH) in May 2008 photographed by Darlene Friedman.
Tags: Ann Arbor, boys choir, Henry B. Roney, W.B. Mershon, white-winged crossbill
Frank Abderholden of the Waukegan News just sent me these amazing photos of a black-billed magpie, golden eagle, and red fox, purportedly taken by a hunter in Montana using a camera phone. The photographer is unidentified.
Tags: Christmas Bird Count
Accipiter versus robin (photo by Tim Wallace on Jan 1, 2010)
My last surviving parent died last January. I talk occasionally to my sister in Arizona and I keep in touch with one cousin who lives locally. Otherwise, the longest continuous thread in my life is as a birder and particularly my participation in Christmas Bird Counts. I went on my first CBC in 1967, a year after I started birding. It was the Evanston North Shore Count, and by 1969 or so I was covering the same basic territory I do today. So I can not help but feel nostalgic when CBC time comes around and afterwards I think about the changes.
Maybe six years ago, I was with Caroline Fields when we were checking the remnants of what had once been a highly productive conifer plantation in Lake Forest (west of Route 43, between Half Day and Old Mill Roads). I commented that on one cold day we had a northern goshawk there on the count. She asked when that was. Forced to think about it a moment, I sheepishly replied, “1968.” Houses now surround the site, and though there are still some pines left, they have been so thinned I no longer even make a visit.
Then there was the horse farm I checked out during the Waukegan Count. One year we found eight Brewer’s blackbirds, a very rare bird on CBCs in northeastern Illinois. Amazingly, they showed up again next year as well. The third year, however, they were gone- but so was the farm, replaced by a subdivision that retains the name of the farm. (My late friend Hollis Baker once said that there ought to be a prohibition against naming a development after something it destroyed. I still bristle at names like Egret Acres or Oak Knoll Estates)
It is not surprising, of course, that vegetation gives way to the inexorable oozing of anthropogenic structures across the landscape. But the unexpected still happens. I mentioned in the blog that on the North Shore count we park at one end and then walk towards cars at the other along a narrow bank squeezed between backyard fences and the channel of the West Fork of the North Branch of the Chicago River (as far as I know, that particular river system does not have any named twigs). One year we parked in the regular spot, just south of Lake-Cook Road. We then drove to our northern parking location to begin the hike. Imagine the surprise when we followed the channel to its intersection with Lake-Cook only to find the car a quarter of a mile west of where we were expecting. The river course itself had been altered over the intervening year.
Although more ephemeral, the people I do this with have changed greatly as well. When I started participating in the North Shore CBC, the team leader was Richard Horowitz, the person who started me birding in November 1966. He would drop me and whomever else was unfortunate enough to be along at a point along the West Fork north of where we go today: there were places along that route where you literally had to drop to hands and knees to avoid sliding into the water. Of course, being teenagers, we found the task to be merely a bit challenging and not the impossibility it would be today. Richard has long since left this area, and has been on the staff of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences for his entire career.
Tim Wallace, a veterinarian, has been a great companion in recent years on the Waukegan count when he is not scheduled to be on standby at his clinic. He is also a regular on North Shore but he covers a different portion than I do. Indeed there are times when I assign possible comrades to other areas needing people, thereby leaving me worrying if I will have anyone. And for the ferrying operation, I do need at least one other person for a minimum of an hour or so. Fortunately the Willinks eagerly agreed to come. Last year it was Jennifer Schmidt, who over the last few seasons has managed to make either North Shore or Waukegan.
Given the role that the CBCs have played for me, I am a little concerned that they don’t generate the excitement they used to. It seems every year the burden of compiling gets a little bit more unpleasant. For the Waukegan CBC, permission to cover various areas requires contacting eight different entities- forest preserve district, US Navy, electric utility, state park, two different corporate sites, private park, and religious college. (It is true that some of those entities are used to us by now and permission is easily granted and a number of the team leaders are now making direct contacts themselves.) The birds aren’t as good as they used to be, and it is more physically demanding to cover some of the same ground. Maybe that is at the heart of my malaise- the counts remind that I am getting old. So what else is new?
Owlers Tim "Andean llama herder" (or Heidi wannabe)Wallace and Jennifer "I am not frozen yet" Schmidt with blue moon over her left shoulder on Jan. 1, 2010.
Rich Biss, Gary Hantsbarger, and Joe Suchecki at the Waukegan CBC countdown on Jan 1, 2010.
Incentives for completing CBC regardless of the weather (Waukegan CBC countdown)