Like everyone online, I’ve been hearing a lot about bird mortality lately. Although this is an expected consequence of the prolonged severe cold and heavy snow-cover we’ve been experiencing, a lot of folks have been expressing concerns that avian flu might be involved too, at least as a contributing factor. Seeing and hearing about dead birds is naturally upsetting, but I urge birders to focus attention and energy on things we can feasibly accomplish, rather than just amplify each other’s distress.
Regarding avian influenza, the most we can do is to seek objective data, evaluate it quantitatively, but most importantly, to advocate for evidence-based local, state, and federal regulation of agricultural practices that potentially interact with virus transmission in natural populations of wild birds—not an easy job, and not one to be accomplished quickly or decisively.
Documenting and recording dead birds is valuable also, but again with the caveat that a quantitative perspective is essential to gain anything useful from the exercise. Every bird dies once in its life, so it is an irony that the vastly increased winter populations of many species (consider that Canada Goose didn’t over-winter abundantly in the Northeast until relatively recently) implies the eventual deaths of all those additional birds. And this “eventual” mortality can’t be expected to play out gently; we know from experience and from general principle that it will unfold in highly variable and irregular ways, just as severe winter weather and pathogen outbreaks are themselves highly variable and unpredictable in timing and intensity.
More useful than counting dead birds would be counting living birds. For instance, we recently completed the NYSOA January Waterfowl Count. Although this was prior to the worst of the severe weather, the data ought still to inform whether catastrophic disease mortality was happening as of late January, and my recollection is that counts during that survey, and during the Christmas Bird Counts a month earlier, were not in any way alarmingly low. And any of us is free to go out now and replicate any part of the effort employed in those earlier surveys. Thirty years ago, a group of purposeful birders began replicating the Block Island CBC in November and again in February for just this purpose, and many people were surprised to learn that Gray Catbirds, Hermit Thrushes, and Swamp Sparrows survived from December to February at rates only slightly lower than did White-throated and Song Sparrows. Clearly, a part of the perception of scarcity in late winter is driven by changes in the behavior of birders, yet our birding effort is the thing that is most completely within our control.
Winter weather is highly variable in the Northeast. Among the many, many mild and snowless winters of recent decades, there have also been unusually severe ones. Many of us remember (or should remember) how much worse the winter of 2014-2015 was than what we have just experienced this year. It’s worth re-visiting the Kingbird Regional Reports for that season (see links to the June 2015 issue and to that winter’s Wikipedia page, below). Terrible as it was, we went out and counted birds on the Block Island Presidents Day Count on 23 Feb 2015, and we found 75 species, 33 landbird species, and 72 landbirds/foot-mile, all predictably depressed (but only slightly so) from the 30-year average values of 80, 36, and 81.
Going further back, there were several exceptionally severe winters in the late 70s and early 80s (Nantucket Sound froze over!). One of the most memorable weather events in my lifetime was the Great Blizzard of 6-7 February 1978 (which followed another blizzard in late January, as I remember). This storm produced more than 30 inches of snow in southern Rhode Island (more than 40 inches in northern RI) and similarly huge amounts on Long Island.
As a reality check to what we are experiencing today, check out the photos in that article to see the congenial relationship between the National Guard and the local people (as well as the conspicuous tobacco use!) in Boston in the aftermath of that storm.
Circling back to things we can do, purposeful birding produces results of great potential value—but especially if they are organized, interpreted, and published, rather than dispersed among the dross and chaff clogging our digital environment. Consider contributing to the Kingbird Regional Reports, or other similar, curated endeavors.
