Birding – Page 9 – State of Wilderness

Current Issues in Outdoor Ethics: Smartphone Apps

Lately, I have been reading about this debate that is raging in the birding community. It used to be that the hobby of birding involved a lot of watching and waiting. It takes patience to be a birder, apparently. The popularity of smart phones and the inundation of technology into our daily lives is changing that, and some are not sure it is for the better. There are apps that can be downloaded to help identify birds (J and I use one called I-Bird Pro) that also play the bird calls for help in identification. These apps can be used, and abused, to lure birds into coming into view.

One side argues that these apps are potentially damaging to wildlife. The National Park Service has banned use of bird calls in its parks, calling it an “intentional disturbance” to bird behavior and biology. It can lead the birds to become desensitized to the calls of others of their species, if they respond to it several times and don’t see another bird on the other end. We don’t always understand the true nature of the calls we are broadcasting, so it is possible it could off territorial birds or interfere with breeding. The birds leave nests unattended to come seek out the call, leaving the young exposed to predators. Federal biologists who were using the call to find spotted owls by listening for them to “whoo” back soon learned that those call-backs would draw attacks on those owls by the more-aggressive barred owls, so the biologists scaled back on this practice in the best interest of the birds.

The other side argues that drawing the birds out is actually less stressful for the birds than tromping through their habitat, disturbing their areas for longer time periods than the short time it takes to play the call. There is no specific data to demonstrate that there is an actual effect on the wildlife, especially when the calls are played correctly (short durations and only when necessary). Experienced hunters and birders have been mimicking animal calls for generations to lure animals to them with no real negative consequences. Before these apps, field researchers relied on the use of cassette tapes to bring the animals out. Is it judicious to assume that everyone who uses these apps will use them irresponsibly, thereby affecting the animals in a negative way?

Another way technology is being used to view wildlife differently is Wildlife Spotting Phone Apps. Apps such as Where’s a Bear and YNP Wildlife let visitors to Yellowstone National Park know where sightings are occurring, up to the minute. Therefore, visitors who are hungry for a bear sighting can find out where the bears are, and get over to that area of the park. If the animal is still in that area, a crowd could develop, which can be negative in terms of human and animal safety. One potential side effect is that repeated exposure to humans desensitizes the bears to them, and potentially grizzly bears that have become desensitized to humans are more likely to attack them.

I am on the fence about these apps. Having been to Yellowstone and seen NO bears or other exciting predators, I would have loved to have up to date information on where the animals were. However, I would hate to do something that is detrimental to wildlife.

Brazos Bend Part II: It’s For the Birds

After staying up until midnight talking, drinking, and eating with our friends on New Year’s Eve, we headed off to our tent. Despite the predictions of cold temperatures, it actually was not a bad night in our sleeping bags, and we felt quite rested in the morning. I flipped us some oatmeal-banana-chocolate chip pancakes that I had found a recipe for on Pinterest while J broke down camp. After all this, we had to drive back up to the headquarters to deal with some unresolved check in issues, and then finally we were ready for our actual goals for the day: work on finding some of the caches in the park we had not found, and record a list of bird species observed for the day.

I had decided that this year we were going to actually keep a species count of the birds we saw. I would say that it was our Big Year, except that we have really never had a “Year” at all. I would actually say that in fact, this is our “Baseline Year”. From the moment we got up, I had been keeping a watch out with the binoculars, bird book in hand, checking off the ones that flitting about the campsite in my Brazos Bend birding checklist that I had downloaded and printed out before we left the house.

When we pulled up at Diane’s campsite to see if anyone else wanted to go caching with us, I still had those items in my hands. We found Rod, and set off down the trail. We spent two hours hiking about along the Bluestem and Bayou trails, attempting to make cache finds. We ended up finding two out of the three we looked for, and I was able to drop off a travel bug I had been carrying for much too long. I was interested to see how my ankle held up, since we want to do some distance hiking this year. I was carrying a little bit of weight in my pack, but not a lot, and my ankle was a bit sore by the time we got back. I hope this will not slow me down from hiking this year. I probably should wear hiking boots and not sneakers when I go – it might help the stability of my ankle, although it is pain in my right heel after long walks that keeps me reaching for the sneakers and avoiding all other shoes.

Our total bird species count for the day was 14. We could have gotten a lot more if we had made it over to the lakes, since we only claimed one water bird species today. There are 4, 987 acres in this park – there was a lot of land we did not cover. We mostly saw birds at the campsites, and just a few different kinds along the trail. My favorite species of the day was the Eastern Bluebird that I saw on our way to the last cache. It was also during this sighting that I somehow lost the cover to the viewing glass of the binoculars, which J found understandably annoying.

These are the birds we saw today: Black-bellied Whistling Duck, Snowy Egret, Black and Turkey Vultures, Killdeer, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Eastern Phoebe, Northern Cardinal, Yellow-Rumped Warbler, Eastern Bluebird, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Tufted Titmouse, Carolina Chickadee, and American Crow. There were probably dozens more, but we are still novices at this birding thing.

These were, of course, the most common species seen today. Go figure. This only confirms my theory that we are making the world a very good place for vultures (or, if you read my previous post – maybe we can blame this on the coyotes).

Purple Martin Madness

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygQoxFMVp_E

You might have seen our Facebook posts Friday about watching the Purple Martins roost in Stafford. We posted enough pictures and videos there that I don’t necessarily feel like I need to double post them here. As far as I know, the only readers of this blog are friends with us over there on Facebook (?). The posted YouTube video, though, is from that same night, taken from someone behind us. Jason and his parents are over to the left of the view, I think I was sitting down at this time. I really enjoyed the hour or so we spent out there.

At first, the birds gathered slowly, and seemingly with little purpose. They weren’t flying as much as they were gracefully gliding with the night breeze. I found their movements to be smooth and silky feeling, and it was relaxing to watch. Birds would glide in and out, and the group gathered in numbers and then eventually in momentum and energy. It went from a few groups of hundreds of birds to a more solid group of thousands, coming closer to the ground and moving faster and faster, tweeting, beating wings in unison. They would light on top of the trees and then suddenly move off en masse, and then more birds would join and they would repeat the process, over and over until they finally settled.

I wanted to share a thought about those graceful little birds that really intrigued me, though. Twelve thousand years ago, before man crossed over the Bering Straight into North America, the martins kept their nests in abandoned chambers of woodpecker nests or hollowed trees. However, at today’s evolutionary point, these birds have stopped nesting naturally east of the Rockies, and are completely dependent on humans setting up houses or gourd-like nests for them. This is a behavior shift that happened over hundreds or thousands of bird generations, as the humans and the martins began mingling.

Back before the urbanization of America, the Native Americans had realized the appeal of these little birds. The purple martins acted like little “scarecrows”, scaring crows away from crops and vultures away from their meat and hides. The Native Americans hung dried out gourds up to attract the birds to nest near them. The birds were potentially able to lay more eggs and successfully raise more offspring to maturity as a result. Over time, the birds returned to these nests year after year, until they “forgot” how to make it on their own in North America. Approximately one million Purple Martin houses are put out by human beings to keep this species of bird going.

By the early twentieth century, this behavior shift was complete. Also, around the 1800s, the introduction of the House Sparrow and European Starling to North America meant that the Purple Martins had competition for resources. The starlings and sparrows take over the houses of the martins, and the martin numbers began declining in the 1980s. Pesticide use and deforestation in the martin’s winter grounds in Brazil have also added to the decline of this species. The Purple Martin Conservation Association formed in 1987, and has been trying to keep these birds from further decline. You can get more information here if you are curious about this association.

This has made me curious about the co-evolution of humans and other species, and also about the ways people help nature. I am not sure if the relationship the martins developed with the humans was negative or positive – while they do benefit from the support of the houses, if we didn’t enable them with the houses in the first place, they might have retained their ability to find their own nests and be sustainable as a species without us. I am going to look for more examples like this to illuminate in future posts.

Country Roads and New Friends

Sometimes I have read that all you need for geocaching is a sense of adventure. I always found that kind of interesting because I thought everyone HAD one of those. Turns out, not so much. A love of nature and appreciation of the outdoors is also not as common as I would have thought.

That’s why finding someone else who has those qualities is like finding a rare coin, something to treasure. Last weekend, I got to spend time with a new friend whom I met through blogging online who has those same inner qualities.

We invited her to join us to watch the bird banding and take a short walk around the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory. We were kind of late (typical) and missed a lot of the banding, but my new friend got some good pictures. See here.

Then we took a hike with her through the Wilderness Park next door to find this geocache J and I had our eye on. Allegedly it was a four mile round trip hike, we might have made it more with circling about looking for the right trail to cut in. Afterwards, we went out to eat at a combination greek/cajun seafood joint that also required a sense of adventure, I think, but turned out to be a real treat, just like my new friend. I am so glad we got to meet in person and look forward to more outdoor adventures with her.

On the way back, J and I took the scenic route and stopped a few times for various distractions: wildflowers in bloom, a line of geocaches, a historic church, a pileated woodpecker sighting. My favorite part was when I was looking for this cache near this old white church in the picture, when I heard this splashing sound behind me, and turned to see that I had spooked the largest herd of deer I had ever seen. There must have been about a hundred of them, moving around in the forest on the other side of an eight foot fence. I am not sure if this place behind the fence was some kind of exotic animal ranch or a paint ball facility, as some had mentioned, but to watch that many animals take to the hoof at a time was kind of cool. I also was hearing the high pitched screech of a hawk, and identified not one but two red shouldered hawks, flying back and forth from the tree I was near to another one across the road. I felt like I was really intruding upon the animals environments out here but both incidents were cool to watch.

Here are some of the flowers we saw in bloom along this drive (Cow Creek Road south of Brazos Bend State Park and northwest of Lake Jackson), and along our drive the next day out 362 from Fulshear to Whitehall and back through Waller and Tomball.

Tomorrow I am going to go out looking for wildflowers again, with my best friend and our children, so hopefully I will have some more pictures of post of spring’s best gift in Texas.