The 2012 Big Sit Results!

The Metro Munchers at their Big Sit circle in Harrison Twp, MI.

The annual tailgate party for birders known (officially) as The Big Sit! has been held each October since 1990 under the auspices of The New Haven Bird Club (the organization that holds the trademark to the name The Big Sit!). If you're not familiar with the concept of a Big Sit, this link has a good explanation. Basically Big Sit participants spend as much of 24 hours as they can stand bird watching from inside a 17-foot diameter circle in some birdy spot.

In 2012, there were 233 registered Big Sit circles worldwide, most of them in the United States and Canada. But there were also circles in Panama, Sweden, Mexico, and South Africa. The braggin' rights for highest species count among all North American Big Sit circles in 2012 goes to to The No Bullsitters who were sitting at Cape May Point State Park on the southern tip of New Jersey. They had an astounding 132 species! Wow!

There were Big Sit circles in 40 of the 50 US states, begging the question of what the heck is WRONG with the 10 states with no Big Sit? [AR, HI, KS, KY, WY, TN, RI, NM, NV, MT]. A few of these have hosted Big Sits in the past so perhaps it's just a matter of not submitting their results. Here is a list of all the registered circles for 2012. And here is a link to lots of other stats for the 2012 Big Sit.

Here at Bird Watcher's Digest we love The Big Sit so much that we've been the promoters and data keepers for it since the 2002 event. Four years prior to that the good folks at Swarovski Optik became the sponsor of The Big Sit's only annual prize: The Golden Bird Prize. The Golden Bird Prize is a $500 cash award given to the winning team to apply/donate to a conservation cause/organization/project of their choice. Here's how the winning team is selected: At their annual winter meeting, the New Haven Bird Club randomly chooses a North American bird species from among all the species recorded on all the North American Big Sits. Then all the Big Sit circles that recorded that bird species are placed into a hat and one lucky team's name is drawn as the winner of The Golden Bird Prize.

The species selected for the 2012 Golden Bird Prize was the sedge wren. From among the Big Sit circles that saw a sedge wren on the 2012 Big Sit, The Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge "Wingers" lead by Dwight Cooley, were selected as the winners of The Golden Bird Prize. 

The sedge wren was the species selected as The Golden Bird for the 2012 Big Sit.

The Wingers had a very "wrenny" Big Sit, recording four wren species among their total: house, sedge, Carolina, and marsh wren. The Wingers plan to donate the $500 prize money from Swarovski Optik to the Wheeler Wildlife Refuge Association. This association, established in 1998, is an advocate for the Wheeler NWR complex and the National Wildlife Refuge Association. In addition, they sponsor and support many conservation and education projects on the refuge.

The Wingers have held a Big Sit at Wheeler NWR in Alabama for many years.

Congratulations to Dwight Cooley and the Wingers for their winning effort at Wheeler NWR in Alabama during the 2012 Big Sit. The 2013 Big Sit will be held on the weekend of October 13, 2013. You can watch the official Big Sit web page for announcements and the opening of registration.

I'm going to write about our own 2012 Big Sit here at Indigo Hill in one of my next posts and explain how we doubled our fun, if not our list of birds. Until then, stay birdy my friends.

NEW NORTH AMERICAN BIRD SPECIES DISCOVERED!

The newly described Dun Mountain Warbler, Pseudoseiurus monochromis, as painted by bird artist Julie Zickefoose!

Dear BOTB Readers:

I’ve been holding this story in for weeks. I’m about to burst with excitement. How often does a bird magazine editor get asked to announce a newly discovered species—in North America?? It’s every bird magazine editor’s best dream. But enough of my yakkin'. Here's the big news!

Ornithologists from the National Bird Observatory (NBO) in Osprey Chalk, Connecticut, are pleased to announce the discovery of a North American bird species that is new to science. The dun mountain warbler (Pseudoseiurus monochromis) was recently discovered by bear hunters on all-terrain vehicles trying to reach forested habitat on the far side of a 10,000-acre mountaintop removal site in southern West Virginia. The species was described by ornithologists from the NBO, who were alerted to its existence when the West Virginia bear hunters (who were being filmed for a reality television show) remarked on camera that "it was the only thing we seen that was alive for miles around."

"This species has apparently moved into the expansive wastelands left behind by mountaintop removal (MTR), and is thriving there," said Patrick Fitzmichael, director of the NBO and chairman of the E. R. Hare Citizen Science Endowment at the NBO. "We found more than 35 nests in southern West Virginia in just one weekend of searching. We think that this population grew out of remnant bands of birds that were living and apparently breeding above the treeline in the Appalachians on scree slopes where no one in their right mind would ever go for birding or anything else."

The natural history of the dun mountain warbler is most unusual. It nests on barren, rocky ground in mountaintop removal sites, laying its eggs among the stones and exposed clay. It flips rocks and pebbles looking for invertebrates, colonizing recent MTR sites, scavenging prey from reptiles and amphibians to insects, even following earth moving equipment with an alert expression and pertly wagging tail, waiting to see what is stirred up by the digging.

The plumage of the dun mountain warbler is described as dirt-brown and gray—or dun—which helps the bird and its cryptically colored eggs to blend in perfectly with their surroundings. Little is known about the dun mountain warbler's courtship, but field researchers were able to catch a short recording of its song, which is described as "a loud beeping tone similar to a piece of heavy earth-moving equipment backing up."

A spokesperson for the Consolation Coal Company reacted this way to the announcement: "We've known for years that our efforts to turn unusable tree-choked mountain habitat into nice, flat, open areas would be good for the environment. If a bird lays a egg on a mountain, what happens? It rolls to the bottom and breaks. The baby bird dies. We're happy that nature is finally realizing that our mining operations not only mean jobs for the local community, but they also make good places for birds to nest. Now THAT's family values, which is what we've always stood for."

Thus far, the dun mountain warbler seems to find its center of abundance in southern West Virginia's coal country, and NBO is mounting expeditions to neighboring states of Kentucky and Tennessee to survey MTR sites there. The future looks bright for this specialized but opportunistic species as mountaintop removal proceeds apace. The Obama Administration has recommended a study to determine if the species needs more breeding habitat. "We're ready to approve more than 150 MTR mine site permits if it means we can help this rare warbler survive and even thrive in the future."

The birding community reacted with great enthusiasm. Jeffrey Giordano, president of the American Birders' Society said. "This is AWESOME! A new bird for our members to chase after. This will certainly be our Bird of the Year for 2013!"

Bill Thomas III, editor of Birders' Watching Digest said, "This is the feel-good birding story of the year! More habitat for an endangered species--and a NEW one at that!"

The Old River Birding Festival in Oak Harbor, West Virginia, will be offering customized tours to see the Dun Mountain Warbler from now through September. Contact the festival at www.birding-wv.com.

Birds & People at MBS 2011

I want to share some images with you from the 2011 Midwest Birding Symposium held September 15 to 18 at Lakeside, Ohio. If you were there, you know we had a really great time. If you weren't there, I hope these images will give you some idea of what the MBS is all about. I'll be posting about the MBS a few times in the coming weeks, but for this initial post, let's just take a gander at some of the birds and people. The image above is a male American redstart. The symposium was held at the peak of fall warbler migration along the Lake Erie shore.

Hoover Auditorium was filled with MBS attendees for both morning and evening keynote presentations by folks like Al Batt, Bridget Stutchbury, Peter Dunne, Julie Zickefoose, Kenn and Kim Kaufman, and Greg Miller (one of the three real characters from the book The Big Year). During the MBS, Hoover Auditorium was sponsored by SWAROVSKI OPTIK.

These are our friends Hugo, Irene, and Rafael from the Guatemala-based tour company Operador Latino. They were displaying their tours and materials in a booth in the Birder's Marketplace in South Auditorium. We had more than 60 vendors this year!

Avid Ohio birder/naturalist Sandy Brown keeps her birdmobile loaded with all the gear she needs to enjoy the natural world. Her license plate says it all.

Out at the six MBS designated birding sites, we had volunteer guides stationed, ready to take people out for some bird watching. All guides sported the official MBS guides' trucker hat: black with the MBS Caspian tern stitched on the front panel.

Over at Magee Marsh, many MBS attendees enjoyed looking at the trumpeter swan families. These birds are part of a reintroduction program that is aimed at restoring a viable population of these elegant birds to Ohio.

In South Auditorium on Saturday afternoon lots of bird book authors lined up to sign copies of their books. Shown here from right to left are: Mark Garland, Marie Read, Julie Zickefoose, Connie Toops, and Jeff Gordon.

Another fall migrant, a magnolia warbler. This beauty was photographed at Meadowbrook Marsh and official MBS birding site on the Marblehead Peninsula.

Bird sound expert and Zen master Michael O'Brien lead a walk to the Lakeside pier to listen for the sounds of migrant birds overhead. This was a nice add-on to his MBS talk "Things That Go Seet in the Night."

Super volunteers Marc Nolls and Mike and Karen Edgington helped to organize and run the MBS bird checklist as well as the conservation raffle. Thanks to their efforts, the generosity of our sponsors and donors, and the avid participation of our attendees, the 2011 MBS conservation raffle raised more than $11,000 for bird conservation causes. The Ohio Ornithological Society agreed to match up to $10,000, so our MBS conservation fund total was $21,000! I'm extremely proud of this.

Among the incredibly hard-working MBS staff were, from left to right: volunteer Sheryl Young, Jim Cirigliano, managing editor of Bird Watcher's Digest, and Ann Kerenyi, BWD controller and goddess of ossumness in charge of details for the MBS.

Guides from MBS sponsor Field Guides Birding Tours lead groups of MBS attendees at Magee Marsh. A total of 137 bird species were seen during the 2011 MBS, including a fly-by red-necked phalarope spotted by Cameron Cox at the Leica Lake Watch on the Lakeside pavilion.

My gratitude to the following photographers who took the images above during the 2011 MBS: Ernie Cornelius, Ann Oliver, Liz McQuaid, Sherrie Duris, Micki Hendrick, and Sandy Brown.

Things I'm Looking Forward To

The Den of Blogniquity at MBS

This fall's Midwest Birding Symposium has given me tons of reasons to be excited, but one of them is our line-up of official bloggers. These men and women have already been writing about the MBS prior to the event, but during the weekend they will spend part of their time in the Den of Blogniquity. What is the Den of Blogniquity, well, it's like a giant comfy bloggers' cave with all the comforts of home, including WiFi and a large projection screen streaming all the updates from our band of bloggers and other MBS attendees. This is going to be pretty cool!



Oh, and you can join the bloggers inside the Den of Blogniquity, or you can stand outside the large windows of Wesley Lodge (location of the DOB) and watch them through the safety glass—like some rare species at the zoo.



West Virginia Fall Birding Weekend

My pals who run the New River Birding Festival have put together a fall birding event that's smaller and more personalized than their May gathering (which is an annual favorite of mine). I'm one of the leaders for this weekend, which is limited to 12 people. West Virginia is always beautiful, but we'll spend much of our time searching for migrant raptors in the sky and looking for migrant warblers in the fall foliage. Details are here. Nothing but fun.







The Big Sit!

Late on the night of Saturday, October 8, I'll be racing back north from the New River to my farm in southeastern Ohio for our annual Big Sit on Sunday, October 9! The Big Sit has been called many things, including "the world's most sedentary birding event", and "a tailgate party for bird watchers." A big mess of our birding pals (and even some folks who don't know it yet that they are birders) will come by the farm and join us in the Indigo Hill birding tower for The Big Sit. Basically we stay in the tower for as much of 24 hours as we can stand and have fun watching birds—trying to rack up a big list. Many comestibles are consumed and there is much jocularity in the crisp autumn air.



You can have your own Big Sit. Here's a link for the inside dope on The Big Sit! (which is a registered trademark of the New Haven Bird Club, in case you were wondering).







The NEW Young Birder's Guide to Birds of North America

My next book, due out early next spring (late March/early April), is actually an expanded version of a previous book. The Young Birder's Guide to Birds of North America has 100+ western bird species incorporated into the 200+ species that the original Young Birder's Guide to Birds of Eastern North America had. The result is a book that (I hope) will turn young people on to the beauty, joy, and utter ossumness of birds. This is the book I wish I'd had when I started watching birds in Iowa in the late 1960s, but I'm as thrilled as can be that it's here now and that I get to share my love of birds with others in this way.



It's going to be 320 pages of fun and it will cost just $15.95. Now, you can order it from Amazon.com et al and save a few bucks maybe. OR you can pre-order it from us at Bird Watcher's Digest and I can add a personalized autograph for the young birder in your life. To pre-order, call us at 800-879-2473 and ask for Susie.

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I could keep going on and on about other things I'm revved up for, but I'd better stop now. I just saw a migrant warbler shoot by the door here at my home office, reminding me that it's time to get outside for some bird watching.

Vinyl Siding for Prairie Chickens

Did the title of this post make you wonder for a moment? I hope so. Sounds pretty weird, doesn't it? But it's true. Let me explain.



Out on the wide-open expanses of the Oklahoma prairie (and in a few nearby states) the lesser prairie chicken is holding onto its existence, barely. But the species' population is a fraction of what it once was. Prairie chickens were once so abundant that they fed pioneer families for entire seasons. Market hunters shot them until the hunters' arms were too sore to shoot anymore. And over the last two centuries, the species has decline significantly from hunting pressure, but more recently as a result of habitat loss and habitat alteration.



Native short-grass prairie is the specific habitat that the lesser prairie chicken prefers. Plow it up for wheat or soybeans or any other crop and the chickens have to go elsewhere. When trees naturally seed and grow up tall enough to cast a shadow, the chickens, feeling the trees might be ideal for a perching or hiding predator, go elsewhere. Plop down an oil derrick or a line of wind turbines—same result: move along LPCs.



All of these factors have contributed to the decline of this very special prairie species. But lurking just above ground level was another culprit in the lesser prairie chicken's decimation: barbed wire. Researchers in the field had discovered what farm hands and ranchers had known for a long time: prairie chickens often fly just above ground level, and because they often fly in to lekking grounds well before daylight, this flying style made them especially prone to colliding with barbed wire fence. The fence is essentially invisible in low light: rusty wire against sere-brown grass.



That's where the vinyl siding comes in. Field researchers looking for a way to reduce fence-chicken collisions landed on a seemingly ingenious solution. Small, three-to-four-inch sections of vinyl siding, with its interlocking channels, snapped perfectly into place on strands of barbed wire. The white hunks of hard vinyl fluttered slightly in the prairie wind, but held fast to the wire. Unlike pieces of white flagging, the vinyl siding lasted through the intense hot and cold and high winds of the Oklahoma seasons. Best, though, they made the wire fence strands visible to flying lesser prairie chickens, even in low light conditions.



My reason for being in Oklahoma was to deliver a keynote talk to the Lesser Prairie Chicken Festival in Woodward, Oklahoma. This festival offers the expected field trips to temporary viewing blinds set up adjacent to known display leks so attendees can see the chickens in action. Since the LPC was a life bird for me, I was excited to make the trip to Woodward. But the festival also offers something that I found to be even more meaningful—a chance to do something to actually help the lesser prairie chicken: by placing strips of vinyl siding on barbed wire fences in habitat adjacent to known lesser prairie chicken habitat.



One of the prairie chicken experts I got to meet in Oklahoma was Dr. Dwayne Elmore (above). He knew the location of most of the active LPC leks in the area.





We met a guy from the Oklahoma Department of Natural Resources who selected a section of fence for us to mark. He demonstrated how to mark the fence for the chickens, pointed to several large burlap sacks of cut-up vinyl siding, then pointed to a long stretch of as yet unmarked barbed-wire (locals call it "bobwire") fence.





We set to work.

The idea was to stagger the siding pieces every two feet or so on the top two strands of wire. This seems to be the most effective use of this collision deterrent, since it's right at the height at which LPCs do much of their flying at dawn and dusk.



Here's a piece of vinyl siding snapped into place. The channels in the siding are just the right size to snap down over a strand of wire, between the barbs/bobs.





As you can see, the white siding pieces present a visual image that's easy to notice.



After the fence was marked and we ran out of siding pieces, we felt a real sense of accomplishment. Here's hoping the fence-marking program results in greatly lower mortality from fence strikes, which could in turn mean more chickens dancing on the prairie.



I've got at least a couple more posts in mind about this wonderful part of the world and the great birds and people there. I'll try to get back for a BOTB visit to the big wide open of Oklahoma sometime soon.