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Songbirds Appreciate Good Coffee, Too

by Hugh on October 17, 2012

Chestnut-sided Warbler by Kenneth Schneider via Creative Commons license

Here at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, as at most workplaces, there’s a lot of activity around the coffee pot. It’s one of my favorite places to run into our scientists and find out what they’re working on. On any given day that could include a study of nesting Eastern Phoebes, a search for a rare Haitian seabird, following Golden-winged Warblers to Colombia, expeditions to do conservation work in Chile, New Guinea, Hudson Bay, or Gabon, and other far-off places.

There’s even actual conservation work going on right there at our coffee pot—just as it is at thousands of other coffee pots around the world. By brewing Bird Friendly certified coffee, birders are helping support rustic shade-coffee plantations that harvest their beans under an intact forest canopy. In an increasingly deforested landscape, these plantations help provide wintering habitat for dozens of species of wintering North American songbirds, including orioles, grosbeaks, tanagers, and warblers like the Chestnut-sided Warbler in this photo.

Many bird watchers already know about the benefits of shade-grown coffee thanks to people and organizations spreading the word over the last 15 years or so. But it can still be hard to go shopping for coffee at your local store: coffee labels carry all sorts of stamps of approval: Organic, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, Shade-grown, Bird Friendly. I’ve even seen “Local” printed on a label—a bit of a head-scratcher since I’m pretty sure I’m at least 20 degrees of latitude away from the nearest coffee bush.

While many of these labels do mean there’s something ecologically friendly about the coffee inside the bag, they each refer to different criteria. And they don’t always tell you something about the quality of bird habitat they support. “Shade grown,” for instance, is a particularly squishy term that provides little confidence about a farm’s growing conditions. So if you want to make a difference for songbirds with every cup you brew—check out our guide to sustainable coffee labels on our blog, complete with links about where to find Bird Friendly coffee (certified by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center) and how to order it online. With “our” warblers already showing up on their tropical winter homes (i.e., Chestnut-sided Warblers are already in Costa Rica and Panama!), it’s a great time to make an investment in their futures—a rich, aromatic, and piping hot one at that.

(Image: Chestnut-sided Warbler by Kenneth Schneider via a Creative Commons license)

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Migration Night Flights

by Hugh on September 15, 2012

Sampling of sightings from 9/11 Tribute in Light in ManhattanHappy Fall!

While this new season means the bushes and trees may have gone quiet around you, we’re entering one of the best times for bird watching. With a whole new crop of young birds fresh out of the nest, there are more birds around now than at any other time of year. Many of them are on their way south, beginning perhaps their first journey to Central or South America with little more than the strength of their young wings and the light of the stars to get them there.

Wherever you live, each new fall morning brings the possibility of new arrivals landing in your yard. Most songbirds migrate at night, gauging wind and weather patterns to decide whether to run for miles with a tailwind or to duck out of rainstorms or headwinds. In a recent post at our blog, Cornell Lab scientist Andrew Farnsworth described a typical night of migration during a special occasion, the 9/11 Tribute in Light. He stood on top of the Empire State Building, and later watched from the foot of the Tribute, to count the numbers of migrants passing over.

Farnsworth is a very skilled birder who can recognize many birds just by the unique, tenth-of-a-second flight calls they give at night. He’s a member of our expert birding team, the Sapsuckers, but he’s also a scientist who studies migration using advanced tools like weather radar and computer models.

His goal, in work like our BirdCast project, is to understand this phenomenal feat of the animal world, and to use the information to help make wind-energy installations and other projects safe for migrating birds. A side benefit is that BirdCast produces birding forecasts to give you an idea what kinds of migrants you might expect to find over the coming week.

On Tuesday night, Farnsworth recorded more than 2,000 birds of some 28 species—and he heard the soft chip notes of many thousands more. Weather radar measurements suggested there were 100–200 birds at any one time in a single cubic kilometer of the night sky over Manhattan, he said. Read the full story over at our blog.

I’ll freely admit that, had I been the one standing under the 9/11 tribute the other night, I might have counted significantly fewer birds and certainly would have missed a few of the species Andrew saw (Swainson’s thrush vs. veery at night, anyone?).

But the larger point is that birds are flooding across the continent right now—Tuesday night wasn’t even a very busy night, Andrew told me later. And I feel like I can never really get my fill of seeing warblers. So the thought of hundreds of redstarts, parulas, waterthrushes, ovenbirds, black-and-white warblers, and more sprinkling down around my backyard each night gives me hope each morning when I wake up.

Even more exciting are the species that only turn up twice a year, like magnolia, blackpoll, and Wilson’s warblers, spending summers farther north and winters farther south than me. Each time I see them in fall and spring it’s like I’m on a platform, waving to them on a train. What birds do you look forward to seeing when fall rolls around?

(Photos by Cameron Rognan.)

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From the Cornell Lab: Gorgeous Red-tailed Hawk Nest Cam

by Hugh on March 22, 2012

Red-tailed Hawks at live-streaming camera via Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Hi from Hugh at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology! Did you see SeEtta’s great action photos of two male Red-tailed Hawks quarreling over a female? She noted that love is in the air and that hawks are getting ready to nest already… and by some twist of good timing, her post comes just as we’re launching our new, live-streaming Red-tailed Hawk nest camera.

The photo above is a picture of the pair on their nest high above the Cornell University campus. The female, who we call “Big Red” for Cornell University, is on the right. She’s a little bigger than the male, with a darker chest and face, and she has a band on her right leg. The male is paler on the chest and has golden-tawny highlights on his face. One of our staff affectionately started calling him “Frostybrows” (although we’re not sure how keen the hawk is on that name). We’re holding an official naming contest—so please suggest a name for the male here.

The pair has nested in this area for at least the last four years, but this is the first time we’ve been able to put up a camera. The views are breathtaking—high definition, with great color and crispness. The birds are now sitting on two eggs, laid last Friday and on Monday. The male takes his turn sitting on the eggs and occasionally brings in prey such as voles, squirrels, and pigeons to give to the female. We’re expecting the eggs to hatch in mid-April. We hope you’ll head over and join us in watching this wonderful natural moment!

Other fun stuff at the Cornell Lab: I heard there’s some kind of college basketball tournament going on right now… but we’re having our own March Migration Madness on our Facebook page. Fans vote on head-to-head matchups, one per weekday, to choose our favorite bird (the “Chirpion”) from a list of 16 contenders. We’re nearing the end of the first round, and we’ve already seen impressive performances from Black-capped Chickadee, Cedar Waxwing, Bald Eagle, and Snowy Owl. There’s still plenty of play left, so please pick your winners and send us your votes!

 

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