Bird of Passage: September 2024
Quick bit of time-sensitive bird world news before we dive in: The Bird Union, the union of National Audubon Society staff, is going on strike August 10–12 in protest of Audubon leadership’s unfair labor practices (National Audubon has been charged with violating federal labor laws). You can donate to the Bird Union’s strike fund here.
The problem with doing a monthly newsletter that includes a short original column is that I have to actually write a short original column each month. As I’m writing this one, on the day after Labor Day, my first grader is home from school with what I very much hope is a cold and not COVID. My husband is taking a turn watching him while I work outside on our patio, and I’m trying to figure out what to talk about here. I spent all of August (during much of which I had minimal childcare) hustling to meet a deadline for a big editing project, and I got it done on time, but I have to admit this newsletter kind of snuck up on me.
How about this: What was your top bird of summer?
Summer can definitely be a “meh” time of year for birding. Once birds are done migrating and finding mates and claiming territories, everything gets so much quieter—not to mention that it’s not much fun to spend a lot of time outside during the (here, at least) hot, dusty, smoky months of July and August. But here, in no particular order, are my favorite bird sightings of summer 2024.
A Common Nighthawk foraging for insects in the air over our vacation rental on Orcas Island in June.
On that same trip, the surprise Purple Martins we saw nesting at a marina (just the one pair of them, not how I picture seeing Purple Martins!).
And after we left the island, a stunning adult Bald Eagle that landed on the shore of Diablo Lake right next to our campsite in the North Cascades.
A Northern Cardinal on a random city street in Peoria, Illinois, in late July. I hadn’t seen a cardinal for a while!
The Lesser Goldfinches that have been haunting our sunflowers ever since they went to seed, so absorbed in eating that they let my son creep unbelievably close.
The Cooper’s Hawk that occasionally flaps around the back corner of our yard in pursuit of the sparrows that hang out in the strawberry patch.
None of these, I admit, are particularly rare or impressive birds, the sort of things that would turn heads on an eBird checklist. But they sum up the summer I’ve had: some travel that was meaningful for mostly non-bird-related reasons, and also lots of time spent enjoying my own backyard, often in the company of a six-year-old. Honestly, I like thinking of myself as an easily impressed sort of birder—there’s always something around worth admiring.
Your turn: What was your favorite bird sighting from the last three months? Leave a comment and tell me! (If you’re reading this in an email, there should be a link at the bottom that says “Leave a comment on the web.”) I hope your fall season gets off to a lovely start, and I promise I’ll be back next month with some less thrown-together-at-the-last-minute things to say.
Words About Birds
I’m perpetually behind on reading my print subscription to High Country News, but I really enjoyed this story from the July issue about Long-billed Curlews in New Mexico. Long-billed Curlews have had a special place in my heart ever since I featured them in the satellite telemetry chapter of my book, and the writer of this piece, Priyanka Kumar, is also the author of the book Conversations with Birds, a favorite of mine from 2023 that (like so many things) made me want to do more nature exploration with my kid.
House Sparrows’ world conquest is one of my (many) bird obsessions, so I was fascinated by a new study that shows that House Sparrows on the fringes of their range, where they’re actively expanding, express higher levels of a particular gene that puts the immune system on the alert for dangerous bacteria in the gut. This apparently means that they can eat risker food (like, in the study, poop-laced birdseed), making it easier for them to colonize new areas.
Another topic of perpetual interest to me: how backyard birdfeeding affects ecosystems. Here’s a new study looking at the effect of dumping all those excess nutrients into the environment. Birdseed is full of phosphorous, and this research from the UK shows that it actually makes a measurable difference in the amount of phosphorous in the local ecosystem, enough that it could contribute to problems like the eutrophication of lakes. Gotta admit, I’m becoming more and more convinced that backyard birdfeeders are actually not great.
Finally, just because it’s really cool, it seems that bird families and communities can develop unique nest-building cultures that are passed down from generation to generation. A study of a particular sort of small, common, communally-living songbird in Africa found that even within the same area, birds in each group had their own distinct nest-building style. The most likely explanation, apparently, is that birds within each group are copying each other and passing on their architectural traditions over time. I love it.
Book Recommendation of the Month
The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel. I usually feature a popular science book or memoir here, but I’ve been on a fiction kick lately, and I really enjoyed this “cli-fi” novel set in the near future about a recently widowed graduate student, part of a team trying to resurrect mammoths as a means of preserving the melting permafrost, who takes her two teenage daughters along on an expedition to Siberia. The girls accidentally discover a perfectly mummified mammoth calf, which sets a surprising series of events in motion.
Upcoming Events + Miscellany
September 11: Northwest Science Writers Association book club (virtual)
September 19: Book talk for Kittitas Audubon (virtual)
I’ll also be at the American Ornithological Society meeting in Colorado at the beginning of October, looking for story ideas; please say hi if you’ll be there too!
I live in Northern California and visited friends in Vermont this summer. Though I used to live on the east coast, it was in a time before I was a birder or even bird-aware at all (what a dull, embarrassing previous life that was!) so I was very excited to see some eastern birds for essentially the first time. I was absolutely thrilled to see a cardinal! And he looked an awful lot like your six year old's depiction :)
I'm definitely an easily impressed birder too, but I did have a very special encounter this summer. I was walking the coast path in Cornwall in the south west of England (I'm a Brit). I had hoped to see choughs - beautiful small crows with lipstick-red beak and legs, which have recently made a comeback after being extinct in England for two decades - but I didn't expect to see dozens of them, calling boisterously to each other as they flew along the coast always in pairs. They have gone from being extinct to not even really rare. It's really good to see a bird whose numbers are increasing when the vast majority of species are going in the other direction :(