Biofiles

Do you like birds? (Sure you do!) Do you know how to count? (It’s ok if you need to use your fingers)

If your answer is “yes” on both fronts, here’s a global citizen science project you should know about – a way to put those counting skills to use to help research bird populations.

This Valentine’s Day kicks off the 17th annual Great Backyard Bird Count, a fun opportunity for folks of all ages to explore the wild birds that live just outside their doorstep, while contributing to a better understanding of our feathered friends. Your assistance helps conservationists determine which bird populations are in trouble and how best to protect them. This year, I plan to participate with my 4-year-old daughter, who already has fun identifying crows, robins and chickadees in our neighborhood.

If you’re new to citizen science or birding, this is a great way to get your feet wet: You can spend as little as 15 minutes identifying and counting birds. And, it’s no problem if you are a beginning birder and don’t recognize all the birds you see. When you submit data to the Great Backyard Bird Count website, just say that you weren’t able to identify certain birds.

The count runs for four days, and during this period, you can conduct just one or multiple counts at practically any location – from your own backyard to a nearby natural area. You can even do the count from the comfort of your own living room, if you have a bird feeder that can be viewed from a window.

The National Audubon Society and Cornell Lab of Ornithology combine the data from this count with information from other citizen science projects, including the Christmas Bird Count and Ebird, a real-time, online bird checklist program. The Christmas Bird Count, an annual effort similar to the Great Backyard Bird Count, was initiated more than 100 years ago by National Audubon, and Ebird is now one of the fastest growing biodiversity databases in existence. Millions of bird sightings are entered into Ebird on a monthly basis!

This vast pool of data helps scientists understand big-picture trends in bird populations. To date, more than 200 studies have been published using citizen science information. These studies have helped us understand a lot about bird distribution and the ways birds’ ranges have changed over time, like how the European Starling has expanded its range in the Americas or how the Western Screech Owl has experienced range contractions. Some of studies document significant population declines, which help bolster arguments for listing imperiled species under the Endangered Species Act (a crucial step for protecting threatened birds).

Citizen science has helped us gained a better understanding of the impact of catastrophic weather events on bird populations. And, in one recent study, citizen science data was even used to document the impact of climate change on the timing of bird migration.

Participation in the Great Backyard Bird Count has increased steadily in Portland over the last few years. Check out 2012, when a total of 230 checklists were submitted from Portland, tallying a total of 97 species and more than 26,000 individual birds. The most common species detected were Cackling Geese, but the counts also included some interesting rarities like the Gray Jay, Eurasian Wigeon, Mountain Chickadee, and Prairie Falcon.

If you want to take part in an effort to help save bird species and have fun while doing it, join this year’s Great Backyard Bird Count!

For more information and to register, visit the Great Backyard Bird Count website or contact me by email.

Recently, watching the sun rise at Fernhill Wetlands, I was startled by what sounded like the rumblings of an earthquake. I turned in time to see thousands of geese bursting into the sky, spooked by an eagle. They arced, swooped, and gently settled back into the water -- a sunrise fireworks show for me and one other early morning trail walker.

As the communications lead for Clean Water Services’ big project at Fernhill, I get to visit the wetlands often. Whether folks or fowl, there’s always something amazing to see: determined photographers shouldering massive telescopic lenses as they trek to the other side of the lake, or workers in their cars at midday, devouring Big Macs as they watch the impossibly fluid flight of enormous white pelicans.

One sunny day, a woman brought her parrot to Fernhill for an outing; I couldn’t help but tell her they were a new twist for this Important Bird Area. Recently, I wandered the wetlands with a true birder who, even without his binocs, spotted a Trumpeter Swan among eight Tundra Swans, a lone Bonaparte’s Gull, two Snipe and a Northern Harrier. I, who can’t get through Birding for Dummies, was impressed!

Many unusual bird species are flocking to Fernhill these days, due in part to the acres of natural treatment wetlands that Clean Water Services is building. The new shorelines, mudflats, and thousands of native plants were evidently just what shorebirds needed.

A visit to Fernhill might be just what you need, too. If you haven’t stopped by for a couple years, prepare to be amazed. Look for the graceful arched footbridges and stunning boulder work created by world renowned landscape architect Hoichi Kurisu. Since the summer of 2012, there’s a new picnic shelter and rest room, and the parking lot was just reconfigured with a roundabout and more spaces. Be sure to walk on back to the Water Garden and the first of the natural treatment wetlands. These features add beauty, but they’re also part of a working landscape: cooling and naturalizing the water while increasing treatment capacity for Clean Water Services.

And there’s more to come: new trails and, within the next year, waterfalls -- an elegant solution to aerate treated water.

Every day that I visit Fernhill, I marvel at how these tranquil wetlands meet such complex objectives: improved wildlife habitat, beautiful spaces for people, and cost-effective water treatment. It's a thought that stays with me while I wander -- at least, until interrupted by the next gaggle of geese erupting into the sky.

Watch the Voices of Fernhill videos to see what people are saying about this precious place. For cyclists, Fernhill is a stop on the newly opened Tualatin Valley Scenic Bikeway!

“Yeah, but who is going to keep this going when you’re dead?”

Now there’s a question you don’t hear every day. But there it was, recently directed at me from a group member during a recent tour of West Linn’s White Oak Savanna -- a natural site my husband and I have been working to restore since 2005.

Blunt but interesting, I thought. Because when think about it, this question is something that all of us in the Intertwine (not just those of us with gray hair), should probably ask ourselves more often.

After all, legacy hits at the core of why we conservationists do what we do. Whether we get paid for our work, or volunteer our time, our shared motive is to leave something worth protecting over centuries. While fundraising, politics, and community organizing are certainly important, the ultimate key to our success (or failure)  is whether we can spark a fire in the bellies of our children to serve as stewards of the land after we’re gone.

Especially if the land you’re protecting offers them something in danger of vanishing forever. For over 10 years, many volunteers have helped our small nonprofit, Neighbors for a Livable West Linn, begin to restore the upper 14 of the 20 acres of a rare and majestic spot called the White Oak Savanna.

Today, only two percent remains of the 600,000 acres of White Oak habitat that once stretched up and down the Willamette Valley. Of those 12,000 acres, just one percent is publicly owned -- like our little patch of Savanna. Conserving this beautiful Savanna has to date entailed over 6,800 hours of restoration work, dozens of fundraisers, and plenty of tours -- like the one I mentioned above -- to get the community excited.

But yes, we’ve also taken care to weave kids into our effort. They have worked with us on school plantings, Scout and NW Youth Corps projects, PSU work parties, SOLVE events. They’ve had first sightings with us of coyotes and blue camas. They’ve hopped on tree swings, and come to love this land with us. They are quick studies.

And lately, they show us how it’s done. Young students at a local after-school Camp Fire program at Trillium Creek Primary are now busy doing their own fundraisers for the protection of the lower six acres of our White Oak Savanna. They call themselves the White Oak Savanna Committee.

As a social worker and teacher for more than 35 years, what gives me hope at the end of the day is the potential of our kids to make things better. In classrooms today, I hear kids who are more liberal in their thinking and more accepting of each other than the students I went to school with dozens of years ago.

So when a young person serving me at the local pizza spot remembers me working with their class two years ago, to plant a thousand blue camas bulbs, I feel reassured that we gray-haired conservationists will be leaving The Intertwine in good hands.

Because as I told the site visitor who asked about legacy that day in the Savanna: “It’s the kids who are going to keep things going.”

Last spring, I walked into the exam room of the Audubon Society of Portland’s Wildlife Care Center to photograph a loud-mouthed young barn owl – its banshee-like screeches were a sign the bird was feeling better – that was being treated for a dog-inflicted wound. This was my first up-close look at a case that demonstrated we could do a better job of sharing the Intertwine with others.

As Audubon’s communications staffer, I have the enjoyable task of blogging about the organization’s wildlife rehabilitation work, and get to tag along with the care center’s eagle-wrangling, bullet-extracting, wound-stitching, butt-kicking staff and volunteers as they treat more than 3,000 wild animals a year.

This is a large enough caseload that Audubon can identify problems affecting urban wildlife populations in addition to treating individual animals. My main takeaway from watching these trends unfold in the care center? You need more than good intentions and gut-level reactions to successfully coexist with wildlife in urban settings.

A baby bird found alone on the ground may look like an orphan to human eyes, but it is completely normal for young birds to spend time on the ground after fledging (leaving the nest), and their parents continue to care for them during this stage. Hundreds of healthy fledglings are brought to the care center each summer by people who incorrectly assume the youngsters are in trouble. Unless a fledgling is visibly injured, it should be left alone. It’s also important to protect young birds from human hazards when possible: the barn owl I photographed had been cornered by an off-leash dog.

To help local residents navigate the nuances of human-wildlife interactions, Portland Audubon provides an “ask the expert” form and guides to living with urban wildlife on its website. Many of the topics we deal with are seasonal, and as fall rolls around, there is one problem that almost anyone can help address: migrating birds colliding with windows.

Birds are drawn into Portland’s urban landscape during migration, where they run the risk of striking into windows around almost every corner. Many diurnal birds migrate at night in order to avoid predators, maximize daylight foraging hours, and make use of celestial navigation cues. Bright lights lure these nighttime migrants into cities and confuse them by obscuring their navigational aids, which makes it difficult for the birds to find their way back out of a developed area and its maze of glass.

To protect migratory birds this fall, turn off unnecessary lights at home from dusk till dawn through mid-November, and encourage employers to do the same at the office. There are also a variety of ways to reduce window strikes year-round (my favorite is to stop washing your windows).

Young Swainson’s thrushes have already started hitting windows in Portland – several have been brought to the care center recently – so it’s time to take action for our local wildlife. Turn off those lights!

Well before it gets light, you may have noticed that robin singing. And now, for weeks, he’s been pounding against your kitchen window, depositing powdery feather and eyeball marks. What the heck?

As it turns out, the bigger a bird’s eyeballs, the earlier he sings, possibly because he sees first light. And Mr. Robin has pretty big eyeballs. The window marks are due to hormones; high spring testosterone triggers territorial aggression, making Mr. Robin go after that good-looking “rival” reflected in the glass. Hormones also trigger birds to sing, grow new feathers and migrate seasonally to follow food sources.

Yes, hormones make the world go ‘round, and we should be glad that hopped-up robin wants to claim space here in The Intertwine. From native song sparrows, bushtits, Bewick’s wrens, scrub jays, goldfinches, downy woodpeckers, flickers, spotted towhees and robins, the birds in our yards keep bugs in check, pollinate our plants, spread seeds and provide our most visible contact with wildlife. Studies show that contact with nature calms us and helps our brains work better. With their beauty and curious behavior, our avian allies are nature at its finest. 

So how do we encourage Mr. Robin to stick around? You could start by planting a native shrub. As it turns out, native birds like native bugs, and native bugs are adapted to feed on native shrubs. That explains why native shrubs aren’t usually invasive. In Europe, Oregon grape is invasive because it has no natural predators. Here, bugs are constantly keeping Oregon grape in check by eating about 15% of the plant--which actually helps the plant, by spreading pollen.

Once you’ve established that native shrub, consider planting a few more, such as red-flowering currant, Indian plum, salmonberry, salal and ocean spray. These natives provide flowers and fruit over a long season, and some, like Ocean spray, host caterpillars -- basically slow-moving Big Macs for a hungry songbird.

Got plants? Next, think about a water feature -- a simple bird bath where birds can refresh. Just keep it shallow enough that small birds won’t drown and, if cats visit your yard (I keep mine inside) place it away from heavy vegetation so birds can see what’s coming.

Now, think about your entire yard. Strategic plantings not only cool temperatures for those hot-day backyard barbecues, but can form a nice patch of habitat. Birds are now teeming, even breeding, in the part of my backyard where I replaced lawn with native shrubs. I never water or fertilize, and intentionally leave this patch messy, because towhees need leaf litter and birds love brushpiles. It's our own little piece of woods, and also helps protect the stream behind our house. After all, my yard is part of The Intertwine (and yours is, too).

Next, let’s train our binoculars on the neighborhood. Are you near an Intertwine  greenspace? Greenspaces often serve as both wildlife habitat and movement corridors.  Most birds within The Intertwine migrate; if they are stuck here all year, they won’t make it. The broader the greenspace, the more animals (and native plants) can move along the corridor. With the right plants -- or even a good line of street trees or shrubs -- your backyard can effectively widen the corridor, and all of the sudden you’re helping a LOT more birds.

Over the past several years, Alliance partners have been working to map The Intertwine’s wildlife corridors. While that work is not yet finished, be assured that your yard can be part of that network. Before too long, Friends of Trees and the Backyard Habitat Certification Program (courtesy of Columbia Land Trust and Audubon) can help you figure out strategic places to encourage plantings, even in our most urban areas. At the scale of The Intertwine, every single tree and shrub helps pollinators and birds -- to nest, rest,  feast on Big Mac caterpillars, and remind us, like noisy Mr. Robin, that another dawn approaches.