A New Albatross for Midway

 

Short-tailed Albatross -Photo coutrtesy of Jlfutari at en.wikipedia

The New York Times reported a bit of good news this month. A Short-tailed Albatross was born on Midway Atoll. Midway, the atoll about half-way between San Francisco and Tokyo – and near where the Battle of Midway was fought during WWII – is now a wildlife refuge protected by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Midway is the home base for millions of Laysan Albatrosses, but very few Short-tailed Albatrosses.

 

That’s because Short-tailed Albatrosses were almost extirpated from the earth in the late 19^th century. People liked their feathers, you see, and hunters killed them in vast numbers to supply the market.

 

Midway Atoll in 1941 (U.S. Navy Photo)

They were not the famed “Gooney Birds” of Midway that caused so much trouble to airmen stationed on the Atoll during WWII. By the early 1930′s short-tails were known to breed on only one Japanese island and, by the end of the War, were thought to be extinct. However, a few hardy birds wisely spent WWII at sea, survived, and returned to the Japanese Island in 1949. Until this month, not one pair was known to have bred on Midway, despite the fact that millions of its cousins Laysan and Black-footed Albatrosses do breed there.

 

Around the same time humans were mindlessly hunting the short-tail version into extinction, we also began laying the first undersea cable between North America and Asia. Some of that work was done by an American cable-laying consortium which set up an outpost on Midway. Its workers promptly brought many non-native species to the Island to “improve” it. They improved it with canaries, cats, dogs, deciduous trees of all kinds, and – best of all – cockroaches, termites, and centipedes. When we humans set about improving a place, we do the whole job, not just a part of it.

When this “improvement” of Midway was brought to President Theodore Roosevelt’s attention, he promptly sent twenty-one marines to Midway with orders to hold the atoll for the United States and stop the “improvement” before it killed all the birds. After almost a century of use as a Naval air station, the atoll became a national wildlife refuge in 1988 and is now safe for the albatrosses.

 

Improving Enewetak Atoll

 

It is fitting that the United States protects Midway and has now hosted a new short-tailed baby. Short-tails used to breed on another Pacific atoll, Enewetak. We touched off forty some odd nuclear bombs on that 2.5 square mile atoll where the Short-tailed albatross once bred. We took care to remove all the people, but I imagine a great many birds were turned into elementary particles during the time we used the atoll to conduct nuclear tests. We’ve improved it too. We scraped off as much radioactive soil as we could, buried in a big hole on the atoll, and covered with a huge concrete mound. People have returned but, if I were a bird, I’d be hesitant to believe that we’re through with our improvements. Besides, as you can see, the concrete bunker doesn’t leave many good nesting sites.

Enewetak Today ( DOE Photo)

So, welcome to a new citizen and may he or she have a long life soaring over northern Pacific waters, knowing it will have a home on Midway to come home to in a few years when it’s time to breed.

 

This Little Birdie Went to Market

Long-time readers know that the distaff side of this house runs the Fat Finch Store. This blog is my primary contribution, as I am lost when it comes to retailing. Nonetheless, I was invited on recent trips to market and I am here to tell you about it.

For those of you unacquainted with the process, many wholesalers maintain shops of their own in large market buildings in Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York City, Dallas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Some markets are huge. For instance, the Atlanta market consists of three 22 story buildings full of these wholesale shops. All kinds of retailers come to these markets to buy goods to resell to you and me.

This year the Fat Finch traveled to the Atlanta and Dallas markets. I didn’t go to Atlanta, but I have just returned from the Dallas market, which is smaller but still almost too much for me to absorb. Dallas has only 5 million square feet of space; Atlanta has 7.7 million. Imagine being in a huge shopping center with thousands of people for nine hours a day and on the move the entire time and you’ll get an idea of what it feels like to go to market.

A big market for retailers reminds me of nothing so much as a casino. No windows, no clocks, mobs of intense people going about their business as fast as they can, making hundreds of decisions about what to buy and what not to buy with their hard-earned money.

A frenetic pace in a frenetic place.

And, for the retailers who shop there, it really is a casino, because they are betting their money on guesses about what you and I are going to want to buy our friends and family for Christmas next year. If they guess wrong, they are left holding the bag. Fully half the stores I entered had Christmas displays. We saw more artificial Christmas trees in three days than I’ve seen in my entire life. Moreover, all those retailers were forced to plan for their next Christmas season, almost a year away. For instance, The Fat Finch bought Christmas ornaments which you will definitely want to come see. And every one of these wholesalers have minimum order requirements. A retailer can’t buy just one or two of a particular item and see how things go. She has to buy in bulk, hoping to sell everything she buys. Retailing requires large up-front investments. Like farming, it is not for the faint-of-heart.

Man Stunned by Pink Christmas Tree

The wholesalers have to be thinking even further out in time because whatever they are selling today has to be ready for shipment in a few short months and they have to get their products manufactured, shipped, and delivered to their warehouses in time to get the product out to the retailers. The fact that most retail goods we buy in the United States these days come from China lengthens and complicates that process. (Although we did hear from at least one wholesaler that for some products it is now cheaper to manufacture in the U.S. And many of the items we sell in our store are made in the U.S.)The wholesalers, just like the retailers, have to predict buying trends before they become trends.

One such predicted trend for next year, we were solemnly assured by one wholesaler, will be octopus. Yes, you read that correctly, octopus. Not to eat, but octopus-themed gifts.

We found that as hard to swallow as the real thing.

Red-tail Hawk in the Canyons of Dallas

The best discovery we made was the Return of the Large (28 oz) Schrodt Hummingbird Feeders. After the first producers of that marvelous hummingbird feeder sold their business, the Schrodt has had more ups and downs than a hummingbird in a clump of wildflowers. And we bought another year’s supply of Best-1 Hummingbird Feeders, another favorite. The hummingbirds returning to our area in a couple of months will find well-stocked feeders for their dining pleasure.

And, courageously ignoring predictions about the popularity of octopi next Christmas, the Fat Finch bought some adorable owl-related products. Owls are popular in our store all the time, not just Halloween and Christmas. Something about owls and representations of owls speak deeply to the human psyche. They are popular on this blog too. Our post about Barn Owls of three years ago remains the most often read post on this blog. Everyone also enjoys reading about their toe dusting.

Now, if you will excuse me, I’ve got to rest.

Migratory Bird Treaty, Part One

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, adopted by the United States in 1918, outlaws the “taking” of migratory birds,or their eggs, or their feathers, or their nests. As of the moment, 836 bird species are protected, although 58 are legally hunted as game birds. In part, the treaty was enacted in response to wide-spread killing of birds so their feathers and stuffed bodies could adorn women’s hats. In the first decade of the Twentieth Century huge hats with masses of feathers, and sometimes complete birds, were fashionable female adornments. Particularly wealthy women might even have a stuffed male hummingbird atop their finery.

American Actress Edith Lyle in 1910

Don Marquis was writing at the time and his type-writing cockroach Archy weighed in on the bird-adorned fashions of the day. By the time Archy wrote this poem, the fashion tide was turning the Migratory Bird Treaty crowned that efforts.

Remember that Archy was the fictional cockroach invented by Marquis. Archy could only type by throwing himself bodily on each key of the typewriter, so he skipped all punctuation. To get the full favor of the poetry, it is best to read it out loud. Or, if you’re someplace where that isn’t practical, this is one time when sub-vocalizing as you read makes perfect sense.

Poets are always asking

where do the little roses go

underneath the snow

but no one ever thinks to say

where do the little insects stay

this is because

as a general rule

roses are more handsome

than insects

beauty gets the best of it

in this world

i have heard people

say how wicked it was

to kill our feathered

friends

in order to get

their plumage and pinions

for the hats of women

and all the while

these same people

might be eating duck

as they talked

the chances are

that it is just as discouraging

to a duck to have

her head amputated

in order to become

a stuffed roast fowl

and decorate a dining table

as it is for a bird

of gayer plumage

for a lady s hat

but the duck

does not get the sympathy

because the duck

is not beautiful . . . .

Being a cockroach, Archy favored the underdog in all situations. So Archy would be happy to know that the treaty lives on, protecting, “any species or family of birds that live, reproduce or migrate within or across international borders at some point during their annual life cycle.” Stiff fines can result from interfering with those life cycles even by knocking down a nest you don’t want under the eaves of your house. We’ll have more detail in our next migratory bird post.

The New Store

We’ve got a new store.

Like the Blue Grouse – soon to be the Dusky Blue Grouse and the Sooty Blue Grouse – the Fat Finch is a short-distance migrant, so we only moved a short distance south of the old place. In fact, the new habitat is exactly one minute south of the old one. And on the other side of the street.

And we did move in late autumn, just like Blue Grouses, but unlike them, we have no intention of returning north next spring. We like the new habitat and intend on living there year round. No reason to expend precious resources and calories migrating when there is no need. We’re confident that we’ll find adequate food and shelter at the new store.

Assuming, of course, that our customers continue to enjoy shopping with us and find the things they need and want. Capitalism, for small businesses, is a competitive ecology and only the fit survive to pass along their genes. We know that our customers are at the top of the food chain and we treat them accordingly.

The new store is a bit smaller and much cozier, but we still carry a full range of birding supplies, gifts, cards, and books. And, if you’d like to know more about the Blue Grouse, we’ve put a comfortable chair right next to the bookcase and don’t mind a bit if you want to come by and read for a while.

You can eat too. There is a nice restaurant, The Calico Cafe,  thirty paces across the parking lot. And a secretive steak house too. We have yet to eat our way through the restaurant’s menu, but so far everything is good. (We always start a restaurant off with its green chile. After all, if it doesn’t have green chile on it, what good is it?)

Of course, the on-line store had no need to migrate so it remains where it has always been.

If you find yourself in New Mexico, come see us. You’ll like the new habitat. The address is 6855 Fourth St NW, Suite D, Los Ranchos, NM 87107 and the phone number remains the same, 505-898-8900.

 

 

 

 

Find the Warbler

We’ve noted before our sympathy with John J. Audubon who shot warblers to get them to hold still long enough for him to identify and paint them. Audubon, of course, worked before cameras were invented.

We have a camera and it can hold warblers still for an instant – assuming we can see them in the first place. We had an advantage with this migrating warbler: We saw the bird moving before taking the photo. All you can see is the still photo, so it will be harder for you to find it. (Motion attracts the eye. We see motion with our peripheral vision. To move is to make visible.

Here is a close up. We thank the warbler for holding still for 1/250^th of second so we could get the shot.

Caribbean Birds

About a year ago we told you about the real James Bond, the author of the best field guide to the birds of the West Indies. Ian Fleming borrowed the famed ornithologist’s name for his famous fictional spy.

Now a new field guide to West Indies birds is on the way, about to be published by Princeton University Press. The latest in Princeton’s Illustrated Checklists, it is the little book you want to carry when you travel anywhere from the Bahamas to Grenada. “Bond, James Bond” is about to be supplemented by Norman Arlott.

Mr. Arlott is not a spy as far as we know, although he is British. He is a fine illustrator of birds. Arlott has illustrated field guides to the birds of China, Europe, Japan, and Russia. In Birds of the West Indies he illustrates and very briefly describes each of the 550 species of birds that live, breed, or pass through the islands.

Many flights to the West Indies from the U.S. connect in Puerto Rico. The book will make you want to get off the plane and stay a few days so you can go in search of the male Pin-tailed Whydah. In breeding season (April to November), its tail grows like Pinocchio’s nose, starting out at a modest 11 centimeters and growing to 33 centimeters. (Page 168) And you’ll wish for an agreement of some kind with Cuba so Americans can again explore the avian richness of that island and see Grundlach’s Hawks and Cuban Parakeets. Being British, Mr. Arlott can go there at will, look at birds, and legally smoke Cuban cigars.

Pin-tailed Whydah

The book is a perfect size for a field guide. 5 inches by 7.5 inches and 240 pages, it weighs in at 14 ounces. (400 grams.)

Generally, we have a prejudice against field guides that put the range maps at the back of the book. It can be a pain to look at the bird, find it in the book, then flip to the back to assure yourself that your identification comports with the bird’s likely range. However, it is not a problem with this field guide. The brief textual entries always name the islands where the birds are found and you’ll always know what island you’re on. For instance, if you are on Petit St. Vincent – and if you are, you have no idea how envious we are – you might see a White-necked Jacobin Hummingbird. But you’ll know you’re in the Grenadines and the text will tell you whether that bird ever visits the Grenadines. You’ll have no need for the range maps. In fact, if you really need to shave weight you could excise the last 70 pages of the book, tape the rest together and save about 4.3 ounces or 167 grams. That weight savings can matter at the end of a long day trekking up and down Caribbean hills on a hot day.

The book retails for $24.95. If you are going to the West Indies, don’t leave home without it

_________________________

Thanks to Doug Jansen for the photo of the Pin-tailed Whydah and the Creative Commons license to use it.

.

Birds of Peru

It’s not easy to write a book review of a birding field guide. One cannot write the wonderful zingers that other book reviewers sometimes get off:

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” (Dorothy Parker)

“I did not know that fourteen publishers had turned down this book. If true, it’s the most encouraging thing I have heard about the publishing industry in years.” (A.J. Liebling)

“The poet accepts oblivion; his lessers seek survival.” (Murray Kempton)

“I never read a book before reviewing it – it prejudices a man so.” (Sydney Smith.)

“Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging. . .” (E.B. White)

But one cannot dodge the task  assigned. The Princeton University Press just sent us a review copy of its revised, updated Birds of Peru from its Princeton Field Guide series, so we can hardly decline to review it. That would be rude and birders are never rude.

Besides, the book covers all of Peru’s 1,817 confirmed species. That’s right, 1,817.  Hummingbirds consume forty pages all by themselves. We count 91 species of Tanagers alone. Where else could you expect to find the field markings and range map for the Rufous-Breasted Chat-Tyrant that lives on the ribs of the Andes? Or examine detailed, excellent illustrations of the thirty species of Antwrens that live in Peru. Or learn about the “professional” followers of the Army Ants that swarm on the floor of tropical forests. These birds follow the swarms and dine on the spiders and small vertebrates that flee the ants.

You may not have known that the Stygian Owl’s status in Peru is not clear. It may be rare or local or just “overlooked.” It’s probably easy to overlook birds in the vast Amazonian Basin. It’s full of trees after all. Twenty-nine major rivers drain the Andes in Peru; most end up in the Amazon.

Five authors and five principal illustrators fill the book with orderly information with a range map just to the left of each species and a right-hand page full of truly fine illustrations of each bird. If there is a bird in Peru that can’t be identified using this field guide and a pair of binoculars, I’d like to see it. The news release announcing the publication date (June 2, 2010) claims that this book is “the most complete and authoritative field guide to this diverse, neotropical landscape.” We believe it. If you’ve never looked at any of Princeton’s bird books, you’ll be surprised at the amount of detailed information they all contain.

It is the fashion in short book reviews these days to insert a paragraph toward the end complaining about something. We expect that is to prove that the reviewer actually read the thing. We have such a complaint: This book is 664 pages of print that is too small for eyes over forty years of age to read without reading glasses. I suppose Princeton claims that the print had to be small or the book would have weighed too much for a field guide. (It almost is too heavy as it is.) The authors admit to having jettisoned, “often with great reluctance” much additional information.

Rufous-Breasted Chat-Tyrant

Plus, 1,817 bird species do rather fill up a field guide.

And what a field guide it is. We’ve never been to Peru and haven’t got a trip planned and we’ve spent hours just thumbing through it. The Peruvian Tourist Authority ought to buy several thousand copies to distribute to tourist agencies. If you never wanted to see Peru, you will after spending some time inside the covers of this book. And you can go anytime. According to the book, most Peruvian species live there year-round.

We’re just sorry that it doesn’t lend itself to any book review zingers like Ambrose Bierce’s, “The covers of this book are too far apart.”

_________________________

The paperback version costs $39.50 and is worth every penny. We’ll be happy to get it for you.

House Finch Spring

As you can tell, the male House Finches in our vicinity are wearing their spring finery. The red comes from their food supply. Females choose males with the most and brightest red, presumably because the reddest males will supply the most food to the female and the nestlings. (Except in Hawaii, where they have been introduced, but display no red, probably because the food supply there is different from the mainland – they love papaya.) Native to the Western United States and Canada, they spread throughout the eastern U.S. and Canada after several were released on Long Island in 1940. As many as one and half billion may live in North America now. Seed eaters, they flock to bird feeders where they prefer black oil sunflower seeds over striped sunflower seeds, milo, and millet. If you watch them closely, you’ll discover they are messy eaters, dropping many seeds on the ground, which both pigeons and Border Collies love.

Lesser Prairie Chickens

Perhaps you’ve never been to the eastern plains of New Mexico. I can describe the scene for you in one word: Flat. Sparsely populated, sparsely vegetated, and sparsely sparse, it is a land of big horizons. Once, before courageous, stubborn, and perhaps misguided farmers and ranchers tried to wrest a living from it, it was all short-grass prairie. But Euro-Americans plowed it for dry-land farming and brought cattle to graze it. One look at it today, especially on a windy spring day when the dust blows, tells you that even if a cow once could have made a living on its over-grazed vastness, those days are long gone.

Before 1880, it was covered with buffalo grass and bison. Buffalo grass, and its cousins, blue grama grass and little bluestem grass, sustained the great bison herds of the southern plains for more than ten thousand years.

Capable of surviving all but the most extended droughts, short-grass prairie could survive neither the cow nor the plow.

Bison, on the other hand, helped the short grasses. They fertilized it, churned the soil so seeds could germinate, and they moved the seed around. In return, the grass, even with its low load of carbohydrates, provided succulent new shoots for the bison to eat.

The grass, evolved to a perfect fit for semi-arid land, could hold moisture a foot below the surface, even during hot, windy days and long dry summers. Timothy Egan wrote of it:

As long as the weave of grass was stitched to the land, the prairie flourished in dry years and wet. The grass could look brown and dead, but beneath the surface, its roots held the surface in place; it was alive and dormant. . . In turn, the grass nurtured pin-tailed grouse, prairie chickens, cranes, jackrabbits, snakes, and other creatures that got their water from foraging on the native turf.”

Contending Male Lesser Prairie Chickens

Only small islands remain and some of those small islands are home to the few remaining Lesser Prairie Chickens. We’ve destroyed about 92% of their habitat, killing about 97% of their population. Nobody knows for sure how many are left, but they once numbered, like the bison, in the millions. Today only thousands remain. Not only did we destroy their habitat, we hunted them like grouse. Of course, they are grouse.

They needed a nobler name.

Once they lived throughout western North America. Fossil remains from the Pleistocene Glaciation have been found in from Oregon to New Mexico. Today they live only in isolated pockets of sand sage or shinnery oak rangeland in extreme southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the eastern edges of the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles and eastern New Mexico.

The males attract their mates – and hardy human watchers – on traditional display grounds known as leks. Often on knolls or ridges and always in areas of sparse vegetation, the males gobble and hop and display, raising their tails, erecting feathers, drooping wings, enlarging their eye-combs, stamping their feet and “booming” by expanding esophageal air sacs. The show starts an hour or so before sunrise and continues for two or three hours. The successful males copulate with as many females as possible before retiring for the day. Sometimes, they return for an early evening encore performance. The females retire to nests, which are usually within a mile or so of the lek, to brood and raise the young.

Lesser Prairie Chickens eat grasshoppers, leaves, flowers, and seeds, especially shinnery oak acorns. They, in turn, are eaten by hawks, eagles, Prairie Falcons, coyotes, badgers, snakes, and humans. Like other grouse, they burst into flight when startled and often fly when moving to and from their gobbling grounds, feeding areas, roosting sites, and loafing sites. Most flights are short-distance, low-level affairs with alternating wing-flapping and gliding.

But mostly they are gone now, victims of a human culture that produced a mind-set enabling Phil Sheridan, General of the U.S. Army to say,

The hide hunters will do more in the next few years to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years. For the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then the prairies can be covered with the speckled cattle and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as the forerunner of civilization.

It would have been better for the prairie chickens had Euro-Americans adopted a different attitude when we arrived on the short-grass prairies:

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. (Crowfoot, Blackfoot Indian.)

That little shadow might have been a prairie chicken.

__________________________

The photos of the Lesser-Prairie Chickens were taken last week by friend Linda Rockwell, who has a new blog showcasing her bird photography. You’ll find it here and many more photos of prairie chickens.

The bison photo is by Jack Dykinga of the USDA.

For more on the bison, short-grass partnership, see The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History 1750-1920, by Andrew Isenberg of Princeton.

For more on the Lesser Prairie Chicken and its relationship to short-grass prairie, see Hagen, Christian A. and Kenneth M. Giesen. 2005. Lesser Prairie-Chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online: http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/364 (Subscription required)

Rachel Carson

Today is the 40^th “Earth Day.” Over at the New Yorker, where they are celebrating the 85^th anniversary of that excellent magazine, they are running a series of articles taken from those eighty-five years of publication. Today, they feature Rachel Carson. Her book, “Silent Spring”, marked the beginning of public awareness that Mother Earth requires attention. The Environmental Protection Agency has published an official history in which it says that its mere existence is the “extended shadow of Rachel Carson.”

Rachel Carson

The first publication of “Silent Spring” came in the pages of the New Yorker which ran three extended excerpts before it was published in 1962. In the first, Carson detailed what happened at Clear Lake, California. Clear Lake was a popular fishing destination that also constituted perfect habitat for billions of little gnats that annoyed the fishermen. Thinking it would be good to rid the lake of those pests, the authorities decided to spray the lake with DDD, a close cousin of DDT. Three times they sprayed and millions of gnats died.

Unfortunately so did the Western Grebes.

Western Grebe

“The following winter months brought the first intimation that other life was affected; the western grebes on the lake began to die, and soon more than a hundred of them had been reported dead. At Clear Lake, the western grebe is a breeding bird and also a winter visitant, attracted by the abundant fish of the lake. It is a bird of spectacular appearance and beguiling habits, building floating nests in shallow lakes of the western United States and Canada…. Following a third assault on the ever-resilient gnat population, in September, 1957—again in a concentration of one part of DDD to fifty million parts of water—more grebes died . . . .”

By now, we know the rest of the story. As Carson wrote,

“Water, of course, supports long chains of life – from the small-as-dust green cells of the drifting plant plankton, through the minute water fleas, to the fish that strain plankton from the water and are, in turn, eaten by other fish or by birds, mink, raccoons, and man himself, in an endless transfer of materials from life to life. We know that the minerals necessary for all these forms of life are extracted from the water and passed from link to link of the food chains.”

The DDD sprayed to kill the gnats went to the fish where it concentrated and then to the grebes which ate the fish and then died.

All this reminded me of archy the cockroach’s complaint in the poem by Don Marquis called, “Pity the Poor Spider.”

I will admit that some

of the insects do not lead

noble lives but is every

man s hand to be against them

yours for less justice

and more charity

Happy Earth Day.

____________________________

The part of the Carson piece in the New Yorker that you can read without a subscription is here. The entire piece requires a subscription but it’s worth it. Subscribe to the magazine and you get access to the entire eighty-five years of the New Yorker, every article and every cartoon. We read around in back issues the way a dog eats dinner.

What’s more, the New Yorker remains true to its environmental concerns. Elizabeth Kolbert picked up the Carson mantle and carries it forward.

The Western Grebe photo is by Dominic Sherony and graciously made available through creative commons. The photo of Rachel Carson is her USFWS official portrait and is in the public domain.