Do you remember the beautiful old beech tree I wrote about, the one that was being exposed by the building of trails in a new park? I had feared the woods would be ruined by invasive species and drying winds as one side of it was opened up to build soccer fields.  The beech, I figured, would be defaced by pen-knife yielding initial-carvers.

Well, we returned recently and things were worse than I expected.  The one side is indeed opened up, and facing acres and acres of mowed soccer fields, all empty even on a glorious summer day.  I’ve come to learn this huge park was rammed down the throats of taxpayers, who protested the $3 million price tag, especially considering that there was no money in the budget to operate the park!

What appear in the master plan as “fishing ponds” are actually retention basins, which drain into the lovely woods. Click to enlarge this photo: those are Cedar Waxwings landing on the thick smelly algae mat catching flies.

Another side of the forest is open as well, not to the park, but to a new subdivision.  Here is that side, where that glorious beech tree once stood.  That’s right.  It was cut down, along with a few acres of it’s neighbors.

Here come the marching rows of sterile McMansions, with prices in the”mid-$500s.”

I’ll add that this community is legendary for bigfoot homes furnished with lawn chairs — the only thing people can afford after being lured to the “good life.” Recall our economy in the auto capital of the world isn’t too hot right now, and foreclosure rates and bankruptcies have skyrocketed.

How ironic is it that there are miles of vacant space in the city of Detroit, where there were real communities once, yet we still continue to destroy our natural heritage to build unaffordable, unsustainable, featureless housing further and further from the city center? There was an excellent post at the DetroitYes forum:

The McMansion phenomenon is indicative of an economic system that is built on cheap credit, cheap land, and cheap oil. It is set up for this system and we are all subsidizing it. The size of the house is  inversely proportional to the amount of community. Community in the exurbs is expressed as conformity, the same size house, the SUV, and everything is “taupe.” As real community decreases, the size of the house increases as a way for the homeowner to compensate for the lack of connection they have to their surroundings, they are in effect, building their own little worlds.

A true urban residence would not have to be huge because a person would be spending more of their time in public spaces with neighbors, not in a traffic jam alone in a Hummer, or a “great room” watching a 54” plasma presenting the latest reality show.

Poverty isn’t just for poor folks anymore, but for the middle-class who succumb to materialism, who equate being rich with “stuff” rather than the things that enrich one’s soul, such as the ability to touch the smooth bark of a beech tree decades older than yourself.

I saw this meme-ish thing at Snail’s Tales, via Abnormal Interests, and thought I’d play along.  Topic = "What is the oldest book you own?" 

I have a lot of old books, most around the turn of the 20th century.  Without poking through every single one of them, the one that came to mind is this bound 1894 volume of the annual report of the State Board of Agriculture of the State of Michigan:

This might seem a dry read, but it contains a long chapter (actually departmental report), "The Birds of Michigan" by A. J. Cook, the first comprehensive annotated checklist of the state’s birds.  I have referenced it a lot.  The first really great Michigan bird book followed in 1912, by Walter Barrows.  There are actually a lot of copies of this floating around (in better shape), but I treasure my stained and spinally-challenged copy, as it was given to me by my late brother.

As did Aydin at Snail’s Tales, I’ll include an old scientific paper. I have a boatload of those, too, but my favorite bunch is the complete run (1897-1904) of the short-lived Bulletin of the Michigan Ornithological Club.

Every person with an interest in natural history should try to find similar books and journals for their area. Nothing can give you a deeper sense of place, or a clearer appreciation for what we have lost.

Early Sunday morning, husband and I set out to once again see what breeding birds we could find by driving routes through Detroit’s withering east side.  We were aiming, ultimately, for cemeteries, but it turns out that even old cemeteries, being well-groomed, had nothing on what is known in aging Rust Belt cities as the urban prairie.

After cruising through Mt. Olivet cemetery (where several years ago I discovered my great-grandparents, victims of the ~1920 smallpox outbreak, were buried in unmarked graves), we headed to nearby City Airport, hoping for Killdeer and perhaps grassland birds along the runways.  We stumbled upon one of the largest areas of urban prairie in Detroit.  The photo below shows many city blocks where only one or a few houses are still standing; probably half of those that still stand are abandoned.  Some streets are blocked by piles of trash or tires, or burnt-out vehicles.

The photo below shows the same area in 1961.  I’ve put a red mark on both shots at the same location for reference.  The missing trees are mostly victims of Dutch elm disease which wiped out Detroit’s 4000,000 elms by the 1970s.

In place of the trees and homes are vacant lots with 3-foot-tall grass and weeds, which does indeed resemble a prairie.  We found Indigo Buntings, Savannah Sparrows, Song Sparrows, and Eastern Kingbirds in these lots.  This is an area known for its large population of Ring-necked Pheasants, which are common throughout vacant lots in the city — more common than they are even in the outlying suburban and agricultural areas (they are kept in check mostly by feral dogs).

Seeing destroyed neighborhoods like this one is sad and disturbing.  White flight after the 1967 riots and the crack epidemic of the 1980s (which reportedly was the main cause of the depopulation of another Detroit neighborhood, shown graphically on this web page — mouse over the image) ignited the abandonment, and crumbling city finances have perpetuated the decay.  That birds and wildlife are using these areas is perhaps the only bright spot in this story.  Detroit can be revitalized, but it will have to be done block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and first in line will be those areas that still have infastructure and life.

Nobody else is really willing to venture to these areas to do bird survey work, so we’ll be returning again this summer, and I’ll bring you more photos and stories of what we find in these re-greening urban expanses.

There was an excellent article in the New York Times Magazine on the ramifications of Wal-Mart so aggressively entering the organic food market. They plan on offering a full line of organic foods at only 10% above conventional food prices. “Cool!” You might think. It will bring organic foods to a wider audience, educating them in the process; it will result in a huge increase in organic farmland and thus a huge decrease in agricultural chemicals entering our water, air, and food. This must be good. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, explains this is not exactly the case.

The catch is really in the economics. To price organic food so cheaply, asserts Pollan,

“…would virtually guarantee that Wal-Mart’s version of cheap organic food is not sustainable, at least not in any meaningful sense of that word. To index the price of organic to the price of conventional is to give up, right from the start, on the idea…that food should be priced not high or low but responsibly. As the organic movement has long maintained, cheap industrial food is cheap only because the real costs of producing it are not reflected in the price at the checkout. Rather, those costs are charged to the environment… To say you can sell organic food for 10 percent more than you sell irresponsibly priced food suggests that you don’t really get it.”

The tip of this rising iceberg is already evident in the recent increasing demand for organic foods.

• The demand for organic milk has resulted in huge feedlots run by agribusiness giants where cows eat organic grain, but othewise aren’t much “happier” than any other dairy cows.
• More organic foods are being shipped from far-flung places; they may be organic, but the environmental costs of the amount of fossil fuel needed to ship them is just as bad if not worse than those of conventionally-grown foods
  purchased locally. This is something I always consider when I shop for food. There are even a couple of websites/groups devoted to eating locally: Locavores and the Eat Local Challenge.

Wal-Mart’s mega-buying will have other consequences:

• A high demand for organic meat will likely mean livestock raised in large Confined Animal Feeding Operations, just like they are today, only fed with organic grain and not given antibiotics. Ironically, these animals will have a higher likelihood of illness, being packed together and not being given antibiotics.
• Wal-Mart will buy from several large producers, not lots of small farmers, in order to keep prices down.
• Wal-Mart is known for squeezing its suppliers. At some point, we might expect corners to be cut (or laws changed) by agribusiness striving to remain competitive and profitable as Wal-Mart suppliers.

This is a thought-provoking article, and I urge you to read it. Seems like everything these days is a double-edged sword. In an article entitled “Six Rules for Eating Wisely” in Time Magazine, one tip related directly to the Wal-Mart/organic food dilemma, pointing out that, “Americans are as addicted to cheap food as we are to cheap oil. We spend only 9.7% of our income on food, a smaller share than any other nation.” When will we learn the true costs of our inexpensive food, energy, and lifestyles? More resources below the fold.

• Business Week: Wal-Mart’s organic defensive.
• The Gristmill: How to make Wal-Mart’s organic push not matter.
• WorldChanging: Wal-Mart going organic?

I know you are not supposed to click your own Google AdSense ads, but recently there were two ads for purveyors of bird’s nest soup, and I had to go see what that was all about.  I knew that bird’s nest soup is made from the nests of various Asian species of swifts.  Not mud or straw or grasses, but the bird’s saliva.  This seems revolting to me, but it prompted me to look into the natural history of these birds.

The swifts in question are in the genus Aerodramus (formerly Collocalia), and the nests of five species are typically harvested.

The most highly valued are the nests from the Edible-nest Swiftlet (A. fuciphaga).  Their 15-gram nests are comprised of nearly entirely of inspissated saliva strands, and are marketed by color: white (75% of the market, shown here), red, or golden.  The various colors are theoretically due to differences in diet, humidity, temperature, and ammonia level in the nesting area (which depends on the amount of feces the birds produce).

The Glossy Swiftlet (A. esculenta) makes nests that are mostly conifer needles and grasses, glued together with saliva, which makes up less than 15% of the nest mass.  The nest of the Black-nest Swiftlet (A. maxima) also has little saliva, and the rest is usually feathers (this is getting more unappetizing as we go along). Nests of Mossy-nest Swiftlet (A. vanikorensis) and Himalayan Swiftlet (A. brevirostris) are also sometimes used.

Swiftlet nests have been used as food in Asia for centuries, and like many rare and unusual animal products, it was (and is) presumed that they have numerous special medicinal (and, of course, aphrodisiac) qualities. Analyses of the nests, comprised of inorganic ash, protein, and carbohydrates, reveal no such beneficial properties. They don’t even have much taste. For the table, nests are soaked, cleaned, shredded, cleaned, rinsed, then cooked, with or without sweeteners and other ingredients, into a gelantinous soup or stew.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, there have been alarming declines in species of exploited Aerodramus swiftlets due to overharvesting over the last several decades.  For much of history, systems were in place, often reinforced not only by law but by ethnic and cultural customs and mores, which established sustainable harvest.  Continually rising prices (to astronomical sums), spurred by the rapidly growing affluent consumer sector in China, has seen a breakdown in these systems. Nest collectors cannot even be bothered to wait until the young have left the nests to strip them from the walls.  Increased rarity drives prices even higher.

To overcome the shortage, swiftlet nests are now being “farmed.” House or barn-like shelters are erected to attract swiftlets. Some are near natural colonies, others are existing structures that already have nesting swiftlets.  In structures housing Glossy Swiftlets, the more valuable Edible-nest Swiftlets are encouraged to nest by placing their eggs in Glossy Swiftlet nests.  The cross-fostered youngsters return to the structure to nest in subsequent years.

Yet swiftlet farming is not practiced or practical across the whole geographic range of the swiftlets. These structures cannot replace the vast cave complexes in which the swiftlets historically nest.  Plundering of these caves not only depletes swiftlet populations, but threatens other cave organisms.  Nest poachers also vandalize geological formations in the caves, litter the trails, and the nest revenue often goes to buy drugs in some localities.

China’s growing economy means more people can afford exotic foods, traditionally valued for their purported healthful properties. I respect the rich cultural history of many Asian countries, a history which includes numerous folk remedies and aphrodisiacs. But I hope that increased prosperity also brings with it a sophistication that allows an understanding of medical science, and a respect for the natural world that prohibits the exploitation of dwindling rare animals.

• Trade and Environment Database case study: Swifts and Trade.
• Hobbs, J. J. 2004.  Problems in the harvest of edible birds’ nests in Sarawak and Sabah, Malaysian Borneo.  Biodiversity and Conservation 13:2209-2226.
• Asia’s wildlife hunted for China’s appetite — MSNBC.

Saturday Cornell will be announcing the results of the winter 2005-2006 Ivory-billed Woodpecker search. According news stories, such as this one today, there won’t be much to say. However, I’ve heard that they have more “interesting” sounds (which I expect will take months to analyze) and about a half dozen more-or-less unsubstantiated sightings. I gather this is due to the fact that at least in some cases, they sent their volunteers into the swamps alone. Surely they could have found enough willing volunteers to make sure everybody had a partner? If there are people who don’t fully believe the likes of Tim Gallagher, do they really want one-person reports from nice Mrs. Betty Who? or Mr. Big Lister?

Anyway, I wouldn’t even bring up the tired subject of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker except that a friend asked me what I thought of the response of the Cornell team to Jerry Jackson’s commentary in the journal the Auk. Having replied to my friend in writing, I thought I may as well share the words with you. He asked what I thought of the letter. I thought, “Man, this has really degraded into petty nitpicking.” I thought that by and large, many of the points Cornell made were debatable, often a matter of perspective or even semantics. In fact, in parts it was a breathtaking example of the finest hairsplitting I’ve seen in some time.

For those of you late to the party, Jackson offered his (generally critical) opinion on the circumstances surrounding the reported rediscovery of the woodpecker and the subsequent publicity in the January 2006 issue of the Auk, which is the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union. The most recent issue contains a reply, written by most or all of the authors of the original paper on the rediscovery (hereafter just referred to as “Cornell” for the sake of brevity), which was published in April 2005 in the journal Science. Curiously, the title of the reply is “Clarifications about current research on the status of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas,” even though it is a rebuttal to a commentary.

Just one example of split hairs is the issue of funding. Jackson called it a “reallocation” of funds which resulted in funding not going to other endangered species. Cornell refuted this, saying that the funding came from “unallocated funds available for preventing extinctions, species recovery, law enforcement, and migratory bird management…”

If these funds had not gone to the woodpecker, would they not have gone to aid other real, living populations of other species? It is hard for me to believe that there is an $11 million chunk of money sitting in a federal budget that never gets used except in extraordinary circumstances such as the rediscovery of a species that has been presumed extinct. That’s just hard to swallow, and it seems to me that, like other points made in the letter, that Jackson is correct because the end result is the same, and Cornell is correct on a technicality. Tomatoe, tomatoh.

As for a debatable issue, Jackson thought the rapid path to publication of the Science paper compromised the peer review process. Cornell refutes that, saying the paper was reviewed under standard procedures, which included “requests by Science editors that reviewers act quickly.” This seems decidedly non-standard to me. For comparison, I looked at all the papers in the current issue of Science categorized as “Reports,” same as the woodpecker paper (there were 14). Average time from submission to acceptance was 11.7 weeks (shortest 6 weeks), versus 3 weeks for the woodpecker paper. Who really knows if being rushed via special request of the Science editor did not influence the care taken by the reviewers? Would they even admit it?

Cornell took pains to point out that Jackson’s piece was not peer-reviewed science, complaining that the media and Jackson portrayed it as such. Yet they then turned around and criticized him, and the editor of the Auk, more than once for not presenting data or analyses that support alternative interpretations of Cornell’s original evidence, for a lack of fact-checking, good science, and scholarly review!

This may sound like I am dumping on Cornell. In the letter, Cornell says they welcome objective review and criticism of their work. Jackson’s piece was a commentary, yet I thought Cornell’s response was just short of rude at times, with a sort of holier-than-thou feel to it. As a skeptic myself, I may have more sympathy for that point of view. But as I’ve said before, I have friends that are involved on both sides of this increasingly tall fence, and I don’t have a horse in this race myself, so I’m really not out to bust one group’s chops more than the other.

It’s all just twisted and, at this point, incredibly tedious. Worse, battle lines have been drawn between prominent and important ornithologists, research and conservation organizations, and a passionate public which has long been generous with both financial and volunteer support to protect the birds they love. This contentious atmosphere has gone beyond lively scientific debate, and cannot bode well for future bird conservation efforts. I don’t think this outcome could have been anticipated, and I can only hope it is not perpetuated. Somehow, though, I don’t see anybody going quietly into the night.

I am discouraged at the number of House Sparrows I see nesting in bird boxes in my neighborhood. Some of our neighbors have allowed us to put hole restrictors on their boxes to keep the House Sparrows out and allow smaller birds like House Wrens and chickadees in. People enjoy attracting birds to their yards and the idea of providing a place for them to raise their young is especially appealing, but they have no idea that putting up a decorative box is creating a House Sparrow factory, which, from an ecological standpoint, does more harm than good.

If you really want a decorative box, make sure it remains a decoration and block the entrance hole. If you want to host cavity-nesting birds, you should be a good landlord! Ergo, this Bootstrap Public Service Announcement #1: Tips for Backyard Nest Boxes.

• Make sure the entrance hole is sized precisely for the species you want to attract (and remember, there are a limited number of species that will use nest boxes). For House Wrens it should be no larger than one inch in diameter (any hole 1.25″ or larger will admit House Sparrows). Even better: an entrance slit (one inch tall and up to four inches long).
• Make sure the box is placed in the appropriate habitat for your target species.
• Make sure the entrance hole is positioned the correct distance from the bottom of the box so that nestlings are able to leave the nest.
• Mount the box on a pole to prevent predators access. Poles may have to be greased or fitted with a baffle to discourage climbing predators such as snakes, cats, or raccoons. Place the box high enough so that cats can’t jump on the box.
• Nest boxes must be maintained. Old nests must be cleaned out of the box after the young have left the nest. This gets rid of parasites, discourages the boxes from being taken over by wasps, spiders or mice, and eliminates a build-up of nest material that would hinder new nesting attempts.
• Immediately remove nest materials if House Sparrows begin building in your box. You may have to do this several days in a row. If they persist, take the box down or move it. Since House Sparrows are not native to North America, they are not a protected species, and it is okay to remove their eggs or nestlings from a box.

More resources:

• Managing House Sparrows (especially if you have a bluebird trail)
• Cornell’s Nest Watch – all about nest boxes
• Audubon’s tips for attracting birds with bird boxes

This post on the Ohio birding list made me smile:

While enjoying a second cup of coffee on my patio this morning, A YELLOW-THROATED WARBLER LANDED ON MY HEAD. Having very little hair, me that is, it slipped off immediately and perched on the back of one of the other chairs, about 4 feet away and stayed there for about a minute. It appeared to want a cookie, or something, but I had nothing to offer it.

One of my friends  had a Purple Martin land on his head (we have called this guy “Martin Perch” ever since). I’ve never had a bird land on me, but once I did catch a Gray Catbird that was flying past me in my banding lab (a large barn at the time), one handed, mid-air.  A very proud moment. For me.  Humiliating to the catbird, I’m sure.

With the arrival of spring, I am again working on documenting breeding birds for our state breeding bird atlas. In my highly urban county, it seems reasonable that House Sparrow, European Starling, and Rock Pigeon are nesting in every quarter-township atlas “block.”  In the same way that these species are not accurately counted on various censuses because people don’t find them interesting, they are not being confirmed as nesting in very many blocks.  I’ve made it my mission to look for nests in every block they are needed.

Husband and I have found that strip malls are the best places to find these three species, sometimes all in one fell swoop [note to self: determine origin of phrase “one fell swoop.”]. Invariably, these birds nest behind or, more often in, the letters of the store signs.

As you can see, a-holes are especially fruitful.  With little experience, you can anticipate which species will be nesting based on the size of the letters. House Sparrows like tight a-holes, while pigeons like roomy a-holes. Starlings seem to go for holes larger than expected, ones that will accomodate all the crap they like to bring into the nest.

While this post is meant to be, er, tongue-in-cheek, checking store signs is, in fact, a decent atlas strategy for urban nesting birds.