Scientist uses light study to prevent bird collisions

Last year we were with bird expert Bill Evans as he conducted one of his DIY experiments: beaming lights into the sky to test the impact of artificial light on night migrating birds.

Inside his home laboratory, Bill used weather radar to determine if the birds would be migrating across our rural New York location. That’s right – flocks of songbirds are large enough to appear on weather radar systems. “We still have a low cloud ceiling and maybe some light drizzle so the birds can’t see the stars they use for celestial navigation,” he said. “They’re going to have to rely on their internal compass or other cues that we’re not even aware of.”

The light rain is good for the study.  Water particles in the air refract light and lead birds to aggregate. Bird aggregation in cities however, is bad news. “The phenomena is of course what’s causing the tower kill phenomenon,” he said.

Toronto’s Fatal Light Awareness Project estimates that between 100 million and one billion birds die from collisions with buildings every year in North America. Bird collisions typically occur at night when birds are migrating and lights inside buildings are turned on. Bill is trying to understand the mechanism that induces light aggregation in birds, not just in cities, but for the ever increasing numbers of communication towers and wind turbines.

That night Bill learned that certain colours of light are more dangerous than others. Red light, which is typically blamed for bird mortality at tall TV towers, did not provoke bird aggregation but did with blue, green and white light.

Listening to the audio recordings was especially telling. Within minutes of the lights being beamed into the sky the calls of the confused birds increased dramatically. As soon as Bill turned off the lights the calls ended.

In some instances, industry is adopting safer lighting for communication towers and turbines. As for the rest of us, can we be convinced to turn off the lights in our cities?

FLAP launches birding apps for International Migratory Bird Day

FLAP has big plans for International Migratory Bird Day on Saturday May 10 2014, including the launch of two innovative citizen-science applications to their website.  Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP) is a Toronto-based advocacy and rescue group that brings awareness to bird and building collisions.

FLAP has been a big part of the SongbirdSOS story since we began developing the concept of the documentary four years ago. The footage we have gathered with them so far is striking: tireless volunteers racing through the streets of Toronto in the early hours of morning, rescuing injured and dead birds littered across the sidewalks. Another major element to FLAP’s mandate is public outreach, and these new web tools are sure to bring more awareness to the issues.

The first tool is FLAP Mapper, which enables users to enter a bird collision with a building anywhere in the world on a live web map. The data entered will help FLAP and other organizations gain a deeper understanding of the bird collision issue, as well as inspire new methods to reduce the threat.

The second tool is FLAP Tracker, a Bird Migration Intensity Report that amalgamates weather conditions, the moon phase, and weather radar to create reports on the concentration of birds as they fly through the Great Lakes Region. The application will help alert home and building owners when to turn lights out at night and when to treat windows during the day.

FLAP also engages in advocacy on the ground. If you’re in the Toronto area on Migratory Bird Day, be sure to check out their booths at Tommy Thompson Park at the Leslie Spit and the Toronto Zoo.

What are your plans for International Migratory Bird Day on Saturday?

 

The songbirdSOS experts talk about International Migratory Bird Day

On Saturday, May 10 2014 thousands of birders across the globe will be celebrating International Migratory Bird Day (IMBD). We checked in with the experts we interviewed in the film to see what they are doing on this special day.

Robert Rice is the acting director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Centre, which founded International Migratory Bird Day in 1993 in Washington, DC. The event has grown to involve more than 700 events in North America each year. This year, Robert will be going to the Okanagan Valley’s Meadowlark Festival to give a keynote address at the opening event.

In Northern Alberta Erin Bayne is too busy with his fieldwork deep in the Boreal forest to plan anything out of the ordinary for Migration Day.  This spring field season involves coordinating fourty people with work like setting up recording devices, banding for migration studies, and teaching new students about banding, telemetry and behavioural observations.

Ornithologist Bridget Stutchbury will be spending the day with her husband Gene (also an ornithologist) birding around their farmhouse in northern Pennsylvania. She has been trying to attract her favourite bird, the Purple Martin, to the property for years and usually goes to the Purple Martin Conservation area in Erie, Pennsylvania to get her fix. The species’ natural habitat is tree cavities, which are very scarce, so Bridget built a birdhouse colony in hopes that they will thrive in the area. Bridget spotted a Purple Martin on April 6, her earliest sighting yet.

Everyday is Bird Day for Bill Evans. He works on his nocturnal monitoring project every day of the year. Each morning this spring, Bill has been analyzing migration flight calls gathered from six recording stations. Peak migration season is fast approaching, so this is an especially exciting time for his team. On Saturday, Bill will be doing his normal daily routine: crunching bird call data from across the continent to put online on his site OldBird.

Andrew Farnsworth has a busy day of birding in New York City planned for Saturday. The night before, he will be watching weather radar to see how migration is proceeding across the United States. If the skies are clear and the winds are southerly, he will be listening to flight calls in the early morning hours. He will be in New Jersey just after dawn, birding in the DeKorte, Liberty and Secaucus areas, and perhaps to Rumson and Sandy Hook. Later in the afternoon he’ll hit Central Park.

The team at the Aras Bird Banding Station in Turkey has a very busy day planned; they will be banding and releasing birds for an audience of children, students, and members of the public. The district’s director of conservation will also be there. Cagan Sekercioglu, the director of the Aras Conservation would normally be there but he is getting married!

Geolocators track bird migration routes

Bridget Stutchbury is tracking songbirds with cutting-edge technology: tiny light-level logging geolocators.

Every July, Bridget and her team band the birds with the geolocators and these tiny devices become luggage on the birds’ expansive migratory journey, recording light levels from the sun every two minutes, twenty-four hours per day. The technology translates sunrise and sunset times into longitude and latitude so Bridget knows where the bird was when.

These devices don’t send data, they store it, so to learn anything Bridget needs to get the geolocators back. This coming May Bridget will be in Erie, PA to remove geolocators from the birds she banded ten months earlier.

Last July the SongbirdSOS team was with Bridget when she banded the purple martins that were on their way south. She talked about the surprising results she has collected so far. “We’ve seen birds that have travelled from Pennsylvania to the Gulf Coast in only two days.” That’s 1300 kilometres.

Bridget thinks this data will shake up ornithologists’ models for songbird migration patterns. These birds are flying much faster than she ever thought they could fly. She thinks it may have to do with stiff competition over mates and nest sights.

Understanding the timing of the Purple Martin’s migration route is critical – with climate change altering the timing of the seasons, the survival of the species is at risk. “Climate change is a new threat for songbirds,” says Bridget. “Some of our studies will show that they’re going to have trouble timing their migration to match the changes from one spring to the next. It’s not very good news for some of these songbirds.”

SongbirdSOS heads to Germany

SongbirdSOS is heading to Europe for some final spring shooting. Director Su Rynard left for Paris this week to meet up with her crew from Films a Cinq. While there she will be on the look-out for European songbirds and then go bird-watching in a German forest with music composer Dominik Eulberg. Eulberg is an electronic music artist and popular German DJ who has reconciled his love of ornithology with his talent, skill and experience in techno music. Internationally known for his work, he has released numerous singles as well as full-length albums on Traum Schallplatten and Cocoon Recordings. Described as the “a raving ornithologist from the Westerwald”, Eulberg’s fascination with birds means he not only uses bird sounds in his compositions but he also works as a park ranger in some German national parks.

After experiencing a dance club event with Eulberg’s music, Su and the crew will head south to the Konstance Lake area to meet with Dr. Martin Wikelski.  Wikelski is a world-renowned behavioural ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology.  He is researching the conservation of birds and small animals by studying how and why individual animals decide to go on the treacherous migratory journeys and secondly by educating the public about migration as a global phenomenon.   He is also developing an incredible app titled Movebank.

Wikelski was formerly at Princeton in the USA and he is now a leading scientist involved with the ICARUS project, a global undertaking with more than 100 biology laboratories across 17 countries.  With a team of dedicated scientists and engineers, he is working towards the miniaturization of live GPS tracking devices so they will be small enough for songbirds.   This means that in the future there is a real possibility we may be able to see the movements of songbirds during migration with real time  monitoring from the International Space Station.