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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the EcoNews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And joining me is my friend and colleague, the Executive Director of Humboldt Waterkeeper, Jen Kalt. Hey, Jen.

All right, so we are gonna be talking about birds today and we have the best bird expert I know, Ken Burton, local bird nerd, bird biologist. What more can we say? Frequent guest of the show. Welcome. Hey, Ken.

KEN BURTON:

Guys, thanks for doing this.

WHEELER:

All right. So we have a lot of bird related news, but, but before we get to that, Ken, I'm going to spring a quiz on you to see how well, you know, birds and Christmas. So we all know the 12 days of Christmas, the song, 12 days of Christmas, where you, where you get all of these gifts every day, and there are partridges and pear trees and French hens and turtle doves, how many birds, if you were to work it out and do the math, would you receive from the 12 days of Christmas across the 12 days of Christmas?

BURTON:

Oh, you know, I do not have the answer off the top of my head. I assume you do, so I'm... What, you get them every day you get them over again? That kind of thing?

WHEELER:

Get them over again, yeah, so it builds on itself.

BURTON:

Yeah, okay. You know, given the time constraint that we're facing, I think I'm just gonna hunt. Okay. And why don't you tell us, it's probably around 100 or.

WHEELER:

It is 184 birds in the 12 days of Christmas. So you can bring that to your holiday parties, everybody, and quiz other folks. Although I don't think that very many of these are local. Maybe we can call the geese local. Wands. We got swans. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, that's fine. All right. So, so let's get onto actual bird news. Um, so.

BURTON:

Yeah, let's stick with the Christmas theme. Yeah, let's.

WHEELER:

Stick with the Christmas theme. So there is an upcoming Christmas bird count. Tell us what this is. Who's organizing it. Why should we care about counting birds on Christmas? Yeah.

BURTON:

So the Christmas Bird Count originated in 1900, I believe, organized by a few people in New York who were protesting the tradition called the Christmas Side Hunt, where people went out on Christmas and shot everything that moved, basically. My sister, I told her about this this morning, and she said, oh, that was a way for the guys to get out of the house. And she's probably right, but there was this smaller set of guys and some women too, I think, who were kind of appalled by what was going on and started this counter movement to start counting things instead of blasting them. And it grew from that very small start to the longest running biological monitoring program on the planet. And so it takes place every year during the three week or so period around Christmas. And it's probably our best handle on long-term trends of North American bird, really Western Hemisphere bird populations in the early winter.

And that nicely complements other monitoring programs that are in place during the breeding season. So now we've got the winter picture and the spring and summer picture. And a lot of the birds that we count at this time of year really cannot be counted very effectively in the breeding season because they're breeding in the high Arctic and the accessibility just isn't there. Conversely, a lot of the birds that we can count in the summer are now in the neotropics and maybe not being counted as much in the winter. But with the two programs together, two sets of programs, we get a pretty reasonable long-term trend picture of what's going on year round with our bird population.

WHEELER:

So it seems pretty cool. Large scale data collection done by citizen scientists, you know, regular folks built across so many years. It it's so many data points that it can kind of like make up for maybe a lack of other kinds of scientific rigor. It's not a study in like the sense that it's like a master's student going down and doing it. But it is just so much data that. That there will be useful nuggets that I imagine emerge from all the chaos and what might seem like noise.

BURTON:

Yeah, that's absolutely true. There's not a lot of rigor to the Christmas bird count. The protocol is, essentially, go out, spend the day birding within the count area. Try not to count things more than once. Try to get as accurate a count as you can of what you do come across. And document your effort as precisely and accurately as possible. But there is a lot of noise in those data. And a lot of, I mean, the one thing that the Christmas bird count kind of touts itself for is its inclusivity, its welcoming attitude towards novices. People running these counts don't send novices out on their own. But they are contributing. And there is a wide range of skill levels going on out there. So the unexpected things, the things that stand out as sort of atypical do get some review. So it's not just blindly absorbing everything. But yeah, you're right. There's a lot of noise. You collect enough information. And the overall pictures do emerge.

WHEELER:

So locally, is there any group that, that organizes or sponsors this? Is there any sort of local connection or is it done through, let's say national Audubon?

BURTON:

Well, both. So, National Audubon, we're going to be coming back to Audubon, I think, later in the show here. But the National Audubon Society is the organization that runs the Christmas Bird Count in the U.S. And locally, counts can be run by individuals or by organizations or agencies. And in our area, our chapter of the National Audubon Society, which is the Redwood Region Audubon Society, does sponsor the local counts, the Humboldt and Del Norte counts. And that sponsorship, there isn't any money behind it, but it's promotion, it's assistance with getting people involved in these counts.

WHEELER:

Well, it sounds like a great thing to do on your Christmas morning, right? You wake up, have a cup of coffee, go out, count some birds, come back and open presents. It seems like a very kind of pleasant way to start your day.

BURTON:

No, I should clarify that these counts don't all happen on Christmas Day. The count period begins December 14th and ends January 5th. People generally tend to avoid scheduling their counts on Christmas Day. That would make it a lot harder to get participants. Now that we have football on Christmas Day, you know.

WHEELER:

See, to me, the, the idea of doing it on Christmas day is actually one of the things I would like to do because it gets you out of the house. If you have family in town, it gets you away from family, right? Oh, I'll just go be the weird birder. And then you don't have to like deal with snotty relatives and whatnot.

BURTON:

for years. Anyway, nothing at all is stopping you from going out on Christmas and counting birds.

WHEELER:

Blessing. There we go. As long as I have Ken's blessing, I I'm, I'm happy. All right. Well, that sounds very cool. And if you put Christmas bird count into Google, as I just did, you can find a bunch of resources and information about this. And Ken, do you have any other places to send people if they're interested on bird counts, getting into birding, maybe where would you direct folks?

BURTON:

Yeah, the quickest avenue to the local Christmas counts would be through the Redwood Region Audubon Society website, which is rras.org, and there's a schedule there of the local counts and whom to contact to get involved in each of them. Yeah, that's where I would suggest people look.

WHEELER:

And loyal listeners will also note go to the Lost Coast Outpost where you can find show notes for this episode. And we'll have a link in the show notes to information about the Christmas bird count. Yeah. Jen, what's up?

JEN KALT:

And they're all over, right? I mean, you don't have to just be in Arcata or Eureka. They're all over Northwest California, all over Humboldt County. Where do people go?

BURTON:

Yeah, we have five counts in the two counties. There's Del Norte count, more or less centered in Crescent City. There's an Arcata count centered somewhere out near Manila, one in Willow Creek, one that extends from South Eureka to Centerville Beach in Fortuna. And then the one that I run centers the Tall Trees Grove in Redwood National Park. And it covers the Bald Hills and Humboldt Lagoons and Warwick. And I like to think it's probably one of the prettiest Christmas count circles out there.

WHEELER:

Come to think of it actually last Christmas I was out for a walk and I ran into local birder Chet Ogan on Christmas who may have been out doing his Christmas bird count. So shout out to Chet. I now know what you were doing in that random marsh once upon a time. Very cool. And this may be a good transition to our next topic. When you're out doing your Christmas bird count, you might run into some unusual birds. I understand that there have been a number of unusual bird sightings in the area recently. Can you talk to us a little bit about who is in our neighborhood and what the heck they are doing here?

BURTON:

Yeah, well, what the heck they are doing here is a tough one, because it's kind of hard to get into their brains. But we have had some really unexpected stuff show up lately. This Humboldt County, I think we're approaching 500 species at this point that have been found in Humboldt County, which is pretty phenomenal. And I mean, even at that high number, new birds are found pretty much every year. And so that list keeps getting longer and longer. And just this year, if my memory is correct, we've added three so far, and there's still a few weeks to go. And a couple of those are seabirds that people could see only if they were at sea on a boat, which is how they were found.

But the most recent and accessible addition to the list is a bird called a purple gallinule, which is kind of, well, a gallinule, it's in the rail family. So it's somewhat related to a coot, but it's not, they're not, this particular species doesn't swim a whole lot. And it's really, really colorful, purple and green and yellow and orange and white, spectacular and totally unexpected here. Only the seventh one ever found in California, the first one ever north of, I think, Fremont. And just it wasn't on anybody's radar, really. But a couple of people out at the marsh found it a couple of weeks ago. And lots and lots of people have gotten to see it, and it's really exciting. So it's the kind of thing that just sends the local birding community into, it puts us all on Twitter, if you will. Or do we have to call that X now?

KALT:

I have heard the Twitter about it, the chatter from several people, but where are they, what is it doing here? Like, how did it get here? Where do they normally live?

BURTON:

That third question is the easiest to answer. They're commonly found in Florida, for example. Southeast U.S. they get down into tropical tropics of the Americas. Yeah, just not normally found on the west coast at all. So those other questions, the how and why of how it got here, are really hard to answer. We don't know its story. We don't know where it came from specifically. We don't know what brought it here. A lot of migratory birds are, seems to some extent, miswired and their programming just directs them off course to places where they're not expected. Most of those birds are young birds doing it for the first time. Most of them don't survive the experience. So it's really cool for the birders, not so good for the birds themselves most of the time. But every once in a while a bird, or ideally two of them, will land in a suitable location and some new population or migration pattern evolves out of that. That's how remote islands get colonized. So every once in a while it pays off for the species. And then those isolated populations likely evolve into entirely new species.

KALT:

Yesterday I was on the Eureka Waterfront Trail and I noticed a gull that seemed like it was in distress and it just reminded me that I learned some years ago that oftentimes we see a lot of dead birds along the beaches in the fall because a lot of them don't survive their first major storm or maybe their first winter because they don't know how to feed themselves and it's sad. But can you talk a little bit about how much of a natural occurrence it is because a lot of times at Humboldt Waterkeeper we get a lot of phone calls from people worried about all the dead birds on the beach.

BURTON:

Well, sure, I mean, some level of mortality is normal, expected, even necessary. And populations and species don't remain healthy if the less well adapted ones don't die. That's how it works. So there's always this, what we call the background level of mortality. And then when there's cause for concern is when that background level is significantly exceeded. And that could be by some natural event like a big storm over which we may or may not have any control. That's a whole other topic of conversation. But it could be something such as an oil spill. It could be related to overfishing. There are any number of human activities that could be contributing to those elevated mortality levels. And then arguably severe winter storms are maybe more and more human generated. So yeah, but finding a dead bird on a beach is not cause for alarm in and of itself. If you see oil on it, that may be a different matter.

WHEELER:

Well, this brings us back to our first topic, the long-term studies that we have and the usefulness in figuring out if it is just some random dead birds because birds die, it's natural thing. Or if there's some longer term trend that we should be concerned about, right? So being able to have data over time to see long-term trends is really fantastic. And a great reason for all of you citizen scientists out there to participate in the Christmas bird count.

BURTON:

Well, and, not only the Christmas book account, but I'll mention here, because it seems like the right time to bring up the Coast Survey, which is a monthly survey of pretty much all of our beaches counting dead birds. And that's going on up and down the Pacific coast. It's run out of the University of Washington. And so there is a dead bird monitoring and counting and monitoring program in place as well. It's not just live.

WHEELER:

Birds, not just live birds. All right. And this will be a transition to our next topic. When you're out there doing your bird counts and you are thinking about the names of the birds that you are seeing, you might have to update your vocabulary soon because a proposed kind of naming change convention is underway. As I understand it, we are going to get rid of the names of the old white guys who cataloged and named these things after themselves. Is this right? What's going on with, with bird names these days?

BURTON:

Yeah, well, I'll just correct one little thing there. People do not get to name things after themselves. So things are always, I mean, that's even scientists have their, but it is true. Yes. So overwhelmingly the people after which some of our birds are named were white men with very, very few exceptions. And part of this trend of digging into people's pasts, turns out that more and more of these characters had, let's say, unsavory characteristics. A lot of them were, well, they were, it's easy to say they were just products of their time. And conventions do change, morals change, attitudes change. But a lot of these folks were, they were racist, they were slave owners. A lot of them were Confederate soldiers. And I think everybody's familiar with this movement to, to, I don't know, I, some of my personal bias may come out in this conversation, but just bury that recognition of these people.

And so there have been some, some arguments for changing some of these bird names. And up until now, it's kind of been on a case by case basis. Enough dirt comes out about somebody that we start thinking, well, okay, maybe this organism should really not be named after this person. And as far as I can think, only one bird has been changed. Only one bird name has been changed so far for that reason. But the arguments continue. And those arguments, I think, extend all the way to Audubon himself. He's one of the most prominent people in the whole North American bird conservation scene, because the National Audubon Society, which is sort of recognized as the grandfather of bird conservation work in this country, was named after him. And yeah, it turns out he too was not only a racist and, and I'm not sure about slave owner, but his business practices were incredibly disreputable. He made up birds to sell more books. He did a lot of shady stuff.

And so people have been really pushing for the Audubon Society to change its name. And a lot of Audubon chapters have done so. The National Audubon Society has decided not to, for reasons that we could get into, you can look them up. But, and I think that argument has put a lot of momentum in the move to change the names of the individual birds as well. And recent, so an organization has formed called Bird Names for Birds. And it has been lobbying the North American Ornithological Society, which is the organization that makes these decisions to change the names of, of birds that honorific bird names, birds named after people.

And the society just recently announced a couple of months ago that it, that it agreed that it's going to do this and it's not going to take a case by case approach. They're not willing to put themselves into the position of being judge and jury and executioner for each individual person. They're going to do it across the board. So any North American bird named after a person is going to get a new name. It's going to be a gradual process and they are soliciting public input for this. So they don't, they don't want to make, come up with these new names themselves. So there's another opportunity, I think, for citizen science, if you will.

WHEELER:

Well, so I, I like this name change in part because I think that we can have bird names that make more sense in some, in some regard, right? So one bird whose name has already been changed was McCown's long spur. Is that right? Yeah. And now it's the thick billed long spur. So like, at least it's new name gives you some more information about the bird. Whereas before, like it was named after some Confederate general. Like it unrelated to this bird. It was an honorific for that man and whether or not he deserves.

BURTON:

A lot of those names yeah well and I mean deserves it as a human being and or deserves it as an ornithologist. A lot of these people after whom the birds were named had no connection to these birds at all. They were just somebody's friend or somebody was trying to win brownie points or whatever. So yeah there is an opportunity here for a lot of these names to make a lot more sense. On the other hand a lot of these names do have real meaning and real connection and I've learned a lot of valuable history from some of these names and there's some really cool stories that can be told about some of these names.

I'm gonna if gonna throw out Steller's Jay as an example. I haven't heard anything negative about Steller. He was an amazing naturalist. He was a good doctor. I think he was an overall decent human being and he was the one who figured out that Alaska was connected to North America and that was based on his discovery of Steller's the birds that's now called Steller's Jay because he recognized that it was related to the Blue Jay and not to the Eurasian Jay and he had never actually seen a Blue Jay but he had seen a painting once and he said oh this bird must be related to that bird and therefore Alaska must be part of North America. Well he got it right and to me that was just an amazing feat of deduction and I love telling that story and it's going to be a lot harder now but I really have mixed feelings about this. I don't consider myself a revisionist or a or a cancelist but I'm trying my best to embrace it. I actually do like learning new bird names and here's an opportunity. I mean it's happening whether we like it or not let's have some fun with it and come up with some good meaningful names.

KALT:

Well, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of reasons to do this, and one is that the scientific and environmental movements tend to be dominated by white people in this country, and we're trying to expand our reach by being more welcoming, but also you don't have to wipe out the history, right? I mean, the history will still be there, but as a botanist, I see this and I kind of, I have to chuckle just a little bit because the plant names are changing all the time. There's far more plants in the universe than there are birds, and there's no way you could learn them all, and we don't use common names as much, we use scientific names, and they're always changing as science is changing the understanding of the relationships between all the plants, so this family is no longer a family, they're all in this family, or some of them aren't and some of them are, and I think some of it is just, we learned all those names, and now we have to learn all over again and change, and I just heard this great quote recently that if you resist change, what you're saying is that you can't imagine the world being any better than it is right now, and so thinking about the better world that we're welcoming by calling a Steller's Jay maybe a Western Jay or whatever, Western Jay or whatever the name's gonna be, it'll be more understandable to the average person who's new to birding and might be more welcomed by a name that says something about what the bird actually is like or where it lives.

BURTON:

Yeah, well, and I look forward to having more names that are descriptive of the bird's appearance or behavior or ecology or something. Yeah, that's true. To make it easier for people to remember which name goes with which bird, I think that's fine. And I should mention that the scientific names are not being changed, so Steller's Jay will still be Cyanocittis stellarii, for eternity, perhaps. But I want to mention that I am soliciting suggestions for new names for the local birds, and then we'll vote on those suggestions and send the results of that to the Society for their consideration. So if people want to make suggestions, they should go to the Redwood Region Audubon Society website, and they'll find a button there that will take them to a page that describes all of this.

KALT:

That's really cool. I love it.

WHEELER:

That is really cool. Well, unfortunately we are actually at time. So we had a whole nother topic, which was barred owls versus spotted owls, which is one of my favorite topics because I get to, as a vegan, surprise people by coming out as a full throated barred owl removal enthusiast. But we'll have to save that for another time. And maybe we can grab some other wonderful guests like our own local Peter Carlson, who is a spotted owl expert and has been at the forefront of research locally on spotted owls. So Ken, let's save that for a future show. And again, if you get your saving the best for last, I know, right? Again, if, if folks are interested in learning more about the local birds that might need to have a name change and the Christmas bird account, you can find links on the lost coast outpost.com, or you could go to the Redwood Region Audubon society's webpage. Ken what's that URL one more time.

BURTON:

RRAS.org

WHEELER:

There we go. Easy. All right, Ken, it's always so much fun to have you on the show. I always learn so much during the shows. You're welcome back anytime.

BURTON:

Thanks. I enjoy doing these and so yeah, let's do it more often.

WHEELER:

All right. That sounds good. And thank you listeners for joining. Join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North coast of California.