Exploring Capitol Reef. Photo: Rose DePalma

SMRA Explores the Southwest!

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of U.S. National Parks, Saw Mill River Audubon offered an eight-day exploration of five national parks in the Southwest in mid-October. The trip cost included a donation to SMRA benefiting our local conservation and education work.

Fourteen people joined SMRA Executive Director Anne Swaim in visiting Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Arches, Canyonlands and Grand Canyon National Parks as well as Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument and the Monument Valley Navajo Park with a dawn jeep tour.

While not the birdiest time of year for Utah and northern Arizona, we did enjoy several special bird highlights including: a Townsend’s Solitaire in Zion; Williamson’s Sapsucker, Cassin’s Finches and Pygmy Nuthatches in Bryce Canyon; singing Canyon Wrens in Capitol Reef; a beautiful Golden Eagle in Canyonlands; a Say’s Phoebe behind our hotel in Moab; and a very tame Woodhouse’s Scrub Jay at Grand Canyon, where we also caught a small part of the raptor migration through the Canyon. Roger and Michele Garrison had the additional thrill of photographing a Northern Pygmy-Owl along Bright Angel Trail at Grand Canyon.

The main focus of our trip was taking in the spectacularly varied shapes and colors of the southwestern landscape across the Colorado Plateau as we followed the “Grand Circle” tour from park to park, and then seeing all these geologic layers and colors come together in the stunning finale of the Grand Canyon.
Anne Swaim

Photo credits: Exploring Capitol Reef, Rose DePalma; Northern Pygmy-Owl at Grand Canyon, Roger Garrison.

BNA

Revamped Cornell Site Takes Wing

Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Birds of North America (BNA) is an extraordinary public resource, constantly updated for every bird species in North America, even accidentals. A redesign of the BNA website launched this September.

You can explore the site by searching for a species name or scanning the taxonomy list. Species introduction pages—available to those without a subscription—provide general information on subjects like distribution, behavior, breeding, and subspecies. Subscribers can see beyond this introduction, which only scratches the surface of the wealth of information Cornell has put together. Are you interested in when a bird species starts singing, builds a nest, raises young, migrates or changes plumage? It’s all there.

Each species entry allows you to navigate to topics such as Distribution, Migration and Habitat; Diet and Foraging and each of these topics are further sub-divided into sections like Locomotion, Self-Maintenance, Agonistic Behavior, and Predation.

Many Cornell Macaulay Library resources supplement the text, including photographs, videos, sound recordings, distribution maps, eBird range maps, molting cycle graphs, and spectrograms, graphic images of sounds.

The writing is not as lay-friendly as that from Cornell’s more simplified All About Birds web site. The concise language can be dry and jargony, yet still more readable than most science journals. Links are provided for all citations; you can view a full list of references, and, if you are using BNA for research, they’ve made citing BNA easy with “Recommended Citation” on each page footer.

BNA offers personal, institutional, and gift subscriptions from 30 days to three years.
Sarah Hansen

To find out more, visit Birds of North America online at www.birdsna.org

SMRA also recommends www.allaboutbirds.org

BWWA-windows-allaboutbirds

Bird-Safe Buildings – What Can You Do?

On a recent walk around the New York Life Insurance Building in Sleepy Hollow, I found seven carcasses of birds.

This is no anomaly: bird strikes are a major factor in declining populations. Each year in the U.S. an estimated 365 million to 988 million birds die from collisions with glass (Audubon magazine). The birds most often affected include Wood Thrush, Hermit Thrush, Painted Bunting, and hummingbirds.

Birds hit commercial buildings, houses, sliding glass doors, and bay windows: any glass surface larger than a hand, under the right lighting conditions, because windows reflecting the surrounding habitat may look like a flight route to a bird.

What can be done about this problem?

  • Buy bird-safe window materials. American Bird Conservancy rates certain products as “Effective” and “Highly Effective” in preventing collisions.
  • Currently there are three commercial products rated as Highly Effective and six as Effective; all are intended for application on existing windows.
  • If you work in companies that have large glass expanses, discuss with your building engineering department the value of installing bird-safe modifications to windows.
  • Lobby for tax breaks for companies that are willing to install new bird-friendly windows or apply bird-friendly tape, especially if they have multiple large buildings.
  • Apply household glue to outside windows and add sparkles in wavy lines less than 6 inches apart.

Valerie Heemstra
To find out more, visit www.abcbirds.org/program/glass-collisions

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