REBUILDING BARRIER ISLANDS | HOW MUCH IS A SONGBIRD WORTH?

| BIRDING IN HIGH PLACES

FALL 2 01 7

This bird is about to die.

But it may not be too late
to save the species.
Spirit of the West
For five years the photographer Noppadol Paothong traveled
around the West, documenting the life cycle of the Greater
Sage-Grouse, a bird that, he says, “most people probably
know little, if anything, about.” Already working a full-time
job, Paothong squeezed in weekend trips and used his
vacation time to seek out grouse in every season. His new
book, Sage Grouse: Icon of the West, features intimate portraits
of the birds and striking photos of the vast sagebrush
landscape where they live—and where unprecedented
conservation efforts are underway to prevent this chubby,
chicken-like species from sliding toward extinction.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY NOPPADOL PAOTHONG
Text by Alisa Opar

g F L IGHT PL AN
Don’t let those fanciful tail
feathers deceive you. Greater
Sage-Grouse are powerful flyers,
capable of 50-mile-an-hour
bursts that give them a fair
chance at escaping the clutches
of Golden Eagles and other
predators. Yet their wings offer
little defense against one of
their foes, the barbed-wire
fencing that cuts across much
of their habitat: Sage-grouse
can’t see the fine wires and
frequently become entangled
in the barbs, with deadly
consequences. Through the
Sage Grouse Initiative, a multi-
state public–private partnership,
more than 590 miles of fence
in key grouse habitat have been
marked with flags to make the
structures visible to the birds.
g DANC E PARTY
Paothong first photographed
sage-grouse 13 years ago for
a different project. When he
started shooting them again for
his new book, he discovered that
the birds had disappeared from
some of the places where he’d
previously seen them, due to
habitat loss and development.
“It’s heartbreaking,” he says. So
he kept his hopes in check when
a friend took him to this site in
Wyoming. As the sky lightened
he heard the familiar popping
noise males make to attract
mates, and looked down to find
far more birds than he’d ever seen
gathered in one place before.
“This is what it felt like for early
pioneers,” he recalls thinking. “It
gave me goose bumps. My photo
doesn’t do justice to the number
of birds spread across the valley.”
In 2015 the government
released sweeping land-use plans
that protect critical grouse habitat
while still allowing development.
But this summer the Trump
administration recommended
changes to the plans, including
allowing states more flexibility
over energy development
and de-prioritizing habitat
protection. (See “A Grouse About
Government,” p. 8.) Paothong
hopes his images will help
deepen the discussion about
conservation. “I want to show
people that there’s more than
just this bird,” he says. “Protect
it, and you protect hundreds
of other species, as well as the
heritage of the West.”
CONTENTS FALL 2017, VOLUME 119, NUMBER 3

30
Letter From the Gulf The First Line of Defense
Louisiana’s barrier islands are disappearing at an alarming rate. A
new master plan—and a new influx of funds from BP oil-spill fines—
could help rebuild these buffers before it’s too late.
By Justin Nobel

18
Dispatch Safety Net
The only hope to save the Florida Grasshopper
Sparrow from extinction may be to bring some of
the last birds in from the wild to breed in captivity.
This season the race was on to collect them in time.
By Mark Jannot/Photography by Mac Stone

Cover: Paul Reillo

26 holds a four-
day-old Florida
38
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: MIKE FERNANDEZ/AUDUBON; GREG KAHN; TONY LUONG; MAC STONE
Grasshopper
Flock Together Birds for the Battle-worn Sparrow chick that Pollution The Lost Birds
Robert Vallières came back from war scarred both was artificially A biologist traced mercury from a DuPont
physically and emotionally. Now he is working incubated at the spill to contamination in songbirds, and
alongside other veterans to share how his Rare Species devised a new way to hold pollutors financially
experiences with raptors helped him to heal. Conservatory accountable.
By Purbita Saha/Photography by Tony Luong Foundation. (To By Paul Greenberg/Photography by Greg Kahn
learn more, see
“Wake-Up Call,”
opposite.)
Photograph by
Mac Stone

4AUDUBON | FALL 2017


7 Inbox
8 Audubon View
Why Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s plan
to upend bipartisan sage-grouse conser-
vation is a step backward for everyone.
By David Yarnold
10 Field Notes
How President Trump’s proposed budget
puts estuaries and fisheries in Florida at
risk; a toxic lake slowly bounces back;
bird replicas double as conservation tools
and guides for the blind; radar is used to
make mass migration predictions.
LEFT COLUMN FROM TOP: CHRISTOPHER CICCONE/AUDUBON PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS; HONEYWELL; MICHAEL MILICIA
44 Field Guide
Birding Nurture a young bird lover with
inventive games, projects, and trips.
Travel Take your birding to new heights,
from canopy walkways to zipline tours in
the tree tops.
Photography Ducks get a goofy rap, but
they’re diverse and perfect for glamor
shots.
52 Illustrated Aviary
A construction sign serves as the canvas
for a modern take on the Eastern Bluebird.
By Dianne Bennett/Text by Julie Leibach
WHAT WE WERE THINKING
Wake-Up Call
The Florida Grasshopper Sparrow is barely hanging
on in the wild, but there’s still hope.
BY MARK JANNOT, VICE PRESIDENT, CONTENT
I“Why
n the spring of 2013, ted
Williams’s cover story of our
Birds Matter” special issue
was an urgent report that explored
whether the Florida Grasshopper
Sparrow was doomed to suffer
the first avian extinction in North
America since the last known
Dusky Seaside Sparrow died
a quarter-century earlier. That
wake-up call was made all the more
powerful by the photography of
Joel Sartore, who was then seven
years into his ongoing Photo Ark
Project—a goal of which is nicely
expressed in a comment he made
to Williams while they pursued the
sparrow: “Maybe if I can get people
to fall in love with animals like the
Florida Grasshopper Sparrow, we
can save a few,” he said. In fact,
the story did make a measurable
impact: Funding from the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service for recovery
work, which had been negligible,
increased to more than a million
dollars over the next four years.
“The jump in funding was largely
thanks to the Audubon story,” says
USFWS recovery biologist Sandra
Sneckenberger.
The money paid for some cre-
ative and dogged interventions on
the sparrow’s behalf, and for research
that revealed much (but also not yet
enough) about what might account
for its decline. It also funded the
creation of a captive-breeding effort
as a reservoir against extinction. “Maybe if
Late this past spring, a one–two I can get
punch of bad news arrived that people to fall
persuaded me that it was time in love with
for another wake-up call. First, animals like
Sneckenberger and her colleagues the Florida
learned that their funding was Grasshopper
drying up. Then the season’s first Sparrow, we
count of sparrows revealed that can save a
they were still in rapid decline. I few.”
flew to Florida to report on the race
to gather enough wild sparrows to
give the captive-breeding program
the greatest possible chance of
success (“Safety Net,” p. 18). What
I learned convinced me that while
the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow’s
prospects are indeed dire, as long
as the program is able to continue,
hope is not lost.
For the cover in 2013 we used
a classic Sartore shot of a gorgeous
grasshopper sparrow held in the
“photographer’s grip.” This time,
photographer Mac Stone arrived
at the captive-breeding facility
just in time to catch this issue’s
cover image of one of the first-ever
sparrow chicks to be artificially
incubated from the moment it was
laid to a successful hatching. But
it was also wasting away due to
a mysterious inability to process
nutrients. Moments after the photo
was taken, the chick was eutha-
nized to end its suffering. It’s not
an easy image to see, but I do hope
you won’t look away. a
FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 5
 Audubon
Board of Directors CEO & President Content Digital
Maggie Walker David Yarnold Mark Jannot John Mahoney
Chair of the Board Vice President, Content Digital Director
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6AUDUBON | FALL 2017

 INBOX

excellent article. From a basic

scientific point of view, such studies
may advance our knowledge of the
genetics of reproduction. However,
it’s unlikely that we will be able
to significantly control the mouse
problem on Gough Island. The
engineered mice will die off in one
generation, and their male-only-
generating offspring will not be
able to dilute the tens of thousands
of wild mice who will continue to
reproduce normal pups. Killing
them with poisons can reduce their
numbers; unfortunately, these mice
suffer a horrible death, and any
other animal that eats their remains
will also be poisoned. A third and
possibly more effective and humane
way to eradicate these mice is to
incorporate birth control drugs for
both males and females into food
pellets dropped all over the island.
Of course, this presumes that other
sensitive species would not consume
the mouse chow, as that might lead
to further problems.
gerald soslau, professor
emeritus, drexel university
Busy Bird I love that Bob from “Flamingo Road” is educating college of medicine
children about wildlife and all of the challenges the environ-
ment faces. It’s so important that younger generations Author Brooke Borel Responds:
understand what is happening to nature today in order to be You’re correct that the original engi-
part of planning for a better tomorrow! —Suzanne Dormsjo neered mice will last one generation.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JASPER DOEST; ZACHARY WEBSTER/AUDUBON PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS; DAN WINTERS

But if the gene drive works the way

Overnight Adventure
[Re: “Travel: Camping”] In the
past five years, I’ve camped in the
Smokies and backpacked on the
Appalachian Trail in Connecticut.
I loved hearing the warblers sing-
ing in the morning and Barred
Owls hooting at night.
karena johnson
Super Freak
[Re: “The Il-
lustrated Aviary:
American Fla-
mingo”] There
was a time when
a flamingo dropped into Lake
Erie might have come out looking
like this.
pat mellor
Editing Nature
[Re: “Engineering a Better Mouse-
trap”] It may be helpful to liken
genetic engineering of mice and
other pests to that of crops. Both
employ transgenics to selectively
edit organismal genomes. If con-
ducted properly, the process is safer
than conventional methods, which
relied on experimental selective
breeding to obtain desirable traits.
Today’s methods are safer because
we know what genes we are insert-
ing, and we understand precisely
why we are doing it. We can knock
out, overexpress, or insert new
genes in order to create prese-
lected outcomes in a much shorter
window. The engineering described
in this well-written piece merely
constitutes the next step in the
evolution of genetic manipulation.
daniel bastian
As a retired biochemist and
molecular biologist, I applaud the
science described in Brooke Borel’s
the GBIRd team hopes, these mice
will pass it to nearly all their off-
Send letters to spring, which will in turn pass it to
audubonmagazine their progeny, and so on. Whether it’s
@audubon.org. effective will depend on how many
offspring inherit it; how well these
mice forage and avoid predators; and
how often wild females breed with
gene-drive males. Scientists at NC
State are building mathematical
models to account for these factors
and more. No matter how successful
the gene drive, engineered mice will
likely have to be released more than
once to fully control invasive wild
mice. Kevin Gross, a biomathemati-
“It’s so cian associated with GBIRd, says
important this is a “feature, not a bug” because
that younger it adds an additional safety layer; a
generations gene drive that wipes out the target
understand after just one release could be a
what is threat, should engineered mice escape.
happening There are currently no plans to try
to nature gene-drive mice on Gough; a rodenti-
today.” cide campaign is slated for 2019.

FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 7

AUDUBON VIEW
A Grouse About
Government
As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.
BY DAVID YARNOLD, CEO/PRESIDENT
L 11 western states and the
ess than two years after
Department of the Interior put a
bow around the largest conserva-
tion plan America has ever seen,
D.C.-based politicians have stepped
in to fix something that isn’t broken.
Instead of supporting the states and
private landowners in their efforts to
effectively manage land that Greater
Sage-Grouse and more than 350
other species use, Washington had
to “improve” on a solution that took
a decade to reach. Sitting in the big
chair in Washington appears to lead
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to
think he can do a better job of plan-
ning for Western states than their
8AUDUBON | FALL 2017
governors and the businesses and
ranchers who live there.
To grasp why this exercise is so
infuriating it’s important to under-
stand the history. Audubon and its
partners helped pilot collaborative
sage-grouse conservation and cel-
ebrated when, in 2015, the USFWS
determined that the Greater Sage-
Grouse did not need to be listed for
protections under the Endangered
Species Act because of this work.
This success was the result of years
of painstaking collaboration on the
part of state governments, land-
owners, energy companies, ranch-
ers, conservationists, farmers, and
scientists, and represents some of the
A Note on Hurricane Harvey
As this issue went to press, Hurricane Harvey
destroyed much of southeastern Texas, and
unleashed particular wrath upon the city of Houston.
First and foremost in our minds is the safety and
well-being of every person who was affected by the
storm. We are in contact with our staff and chapter
leaders in southern Texas, and once the imminent
threat to human life has gone, we will work closely
with Houston Audubon and our other partners
in the area in recovery efforts that will help make
Houston—and the Texas and Louisiana shores—
vibrant communities and ecosystems once again.
best bipartisan conservation work in
the United States to date.
The plans focus on what’s known
as landscape-level conservation and
provide a clear framework of rules
and expectations that govern how
various interests can use the land.
Secretary
The goal, simply put, is to keep as
Zinke relies
many acres of sagebrush lands intact
on this junk
while supporting economic enter-
science as the
prise. This gives everyone who uses
failsafe in his
that land a way to succeed.
new grouse-
In the end, Zinke decided to
management
toss out the science and hand down
plan.
recommendations that are supported
by no one except fly-by-night drill-
ers who are most likely to operate on
the edge of the law. Instead of acres,
Zinke’s plan focuses on population
numbers of sage-grouse, an ap-
proach that is known to be suscep-
tible to the species’ boom-and-bust
cycles and is a terrible metric upon
which to measure success or plan for
LEFT: PHOTO BY NOPPADOL PAOTHONG; RIGHT: PHOTO BY CAMILLA CEREA/AUDUBON
the future. It also hinges upon sage-
grouse captive breeding, something
that scientists have shown is difficult
to do. Yet Zinke relies on this junk
science as the failsafe in his new
plan. Finally—and worst of all from
a governance standpoint—it creates
ambiguity and exacerbates conflict
that everyone worked hard to avoid.
Please tell our leaders to
stick with the agreed-upon 2015
g management plans that will best
SHARED LAND serve the Greater Sage-Grouse, and
Greater Sage- everyone who makes a living in the
Grouse need American West. You can reach your
intact sagebrush governor if you are in a sage-grouse
habitat in which state, or your member of Congress
to thrive. Federal with this message by visiting
plans imperil it. audubon.org/takeaction. A
 Enhance your
nest egg today…

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 FIELD NOTES
W HAT’S AT STAKE
The Water Keeper’s
Dilemma
The national estuarine reserve system stands to
lose 70 percent of its funding. The people and
wildlife that depend on it stand to lose everything.
BY LAURA POPPICK
JAs enna harper loves fall on
Florida’s Apalachicola Bay.
the evenings cool, she kayaks
through the cypress- and tupelo-
lined sloughs and back channels
that teem with anglers, Brown
Pelicans, and turtles.
Harper both works and plays in
the bay as manager of the Apala-
chicola National Estuarine Research
Reserve (ANERR), a 246,766-acre
wetland that stretches 52 miles from
the Gulf of Mexico into the Florida
Panhandle. The reserve is a hub
of ecotourism, welcoming roughly
30,000 visitors to its nature center
each year and generating $14 to $16
million annually from its fisheries—
money that sustains up to 85 percent
of the local human population.
What’s more, the reserve’s barrier
islands are home to thousands of
waterbirds such as nesting Snowy
Plovers and Black Skimmers, and
wintering Piping Plovers and Red
Knots. Each autumn swarms of
Purple Martins, monarch butterflies,
and other migrants also drop in.
“Everything revolves around
the bay,” says Harper, who’s been
with ANERR for 15 years and has
been running it for the past three.
“People really understand the value
of the resources that we have here,
and they want to protect them.”
10AUDUBON | FALL 2017
That drive to defend the bay
will be even more crucial if Con-
gress adopts the proposed 2018
White House budget in coming
weeks. It would eliminate all Na-
tional Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration funding for the
National Estuarine Research
Reserve System, a group of 29
semi-protected tracts, including
Apalachicola. Environmental
monitoring at these sites enables
scientists and landowners to refine
stewardship strategies for brackish
habitats, which are often neglect-
ed and bulldozed over. In total,
grants would drop by 70 percent,
or $23.5 million, an average of
$633,000 per reserve plus extra
research and administrative costs.
Estuaries are some of the
most biologically rich habitats
on the planet. Having a reserve
system that spans more than 1.3
million acres ensures that they
receive protection, even as they
shield coastal communities from
sea-level rise. Apalachicola is
the second largest in the net-
work, surpassed only by Alaska’s
Kachemak Bay. Its staff works
with Audubon Florida to monitor
and secure the reserve’s bustling
waterbird colonies—the largest in
the Panhandle.
Just as important to locals,
Apalachicola is the gem of rural
Franklin County, where 23 per-
cent of the population lives under
the poverty line. Fishing and
tourism profits can benefit from
insights provided by the routine
marine-wildlife surveys Harper’s
team conducts. “Not only is the
ecology at risk, but the economy
is, too,” says Julie Wraithmell,
deputy executive director of
Audubon Florida.
For example, Apalachicola Bay
once accounted for 90 percent
of the oyster harvest in Florida
and 10 percent of the harvest for
the entire country. But after the
shellfish population crashed in
2012, the region saw an 88 percent
slump in annual catch numbers.
To suss out the exact cause of
the decline, the Florida Fish and
Wildlife Conservation Com-
mission (FWC) dissected hourly
water-quality readings supplied
by reserve staff. They learned that
reduced freshwater flows had dam-
aged the fisheries, and were able to
To read more
stories of
places, people,
identify the maximum salinity levels
that should, in the future, trigger
diversions from upstream dams.
species, and Having experts on the water
environ- is the key to detecting fluxes and
mental work averting new calamities, says
imperiled by Jim Estes, the deputy director
the current of the division of marine fisher-
government, ies management at FWC. “If I
head over to want to get a perspective, I can
audubon.org/ talk to the fishermen,” he says.
whatsatstake. “But I also like to hear from the
biologists. It’s important to have
them there.”
But whether they’ll still be
around in two years is uncertain
at best. The reserve has enough
funds to last until December of
2018; it’s up to Congress and the
state’s environmental department
to stretch support beyond that.
One thing is clear, however: Any
significant cuts would translate
to profound changes to ANERR
programs—to work that benefits
all the national estuarine reserves
and their communities.
g Despite the unknowns, Harper
UN D E RTOW heads to the reserve each day
Jenna Harper has excited by “the opportunity to
held the balance protect a pristine, amazing place.”
between Apala- As she joins the anglers, boaters,
chicola’s fishing and migrating birds on the water,
communities and she’s hopeful it will buoy them for
wildlife for years. decades to come.
ILLUSTRATION BY FELIX SOCKWELL
PHOTOGRAPH BY OSCAR HIDALGO FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 11
FIELD NOTES: RECOVERY
A Homecoming
on the Lake
Following a vast cleanup, a poisoned watershed
sees the return of historic birds and habitats.
BY GWENDOLYN CRAIG
C hris lajewski peers out
on the mouth of Nine Mile
Creek, where it flows into New
York’s Onondaga Lake. The over-
cast June sky looms heavy over
the water, which is pockmarked
with the tussling tails of carp.
Suddenly, he cups his ears. Is that
a Field Sparrow seep seep-ing in
the nascent grassland? He’s been
hearing its song a lot these days:
a good omen for the health of the
beleaguered lake.
Once named one of the most
polluted bodies of water in the
12AUDUBON | FALL 2017
country, Onondaga reached the
federal Superfund list in 1994
and was still in poor shape seven
years ago, when Lajewski joined
the nearby Montezuma Audubon
Center. The five-mile-long lake,
situated just northwest of Syracuse,
was filled with industrial mercury
and PCBs. Resident sturgeon had
been extirpated; the food chain,
contaminated; and migrating birds
stopped by in fewer numbers. “It was
a dead lake,” Lajewski, now director
of Montezuma Audubon, says. “The
community did not see it as an asset.”
Fast forward to today, after
a decades-long cleanup totaling
$1 billion has steered Onondaga
to recovery. Honeywell—which
merged with Allied Signal, the
g company responsible for much of
ARRIVAL the pollution—recently finished
An Onondaga dredging and capping the lakebed
Lake Conservation with a leak-proof lining and will
Corps volunteer wrap up habitat restoration later
(right) plants new this year. Swimmers can finally
wetland, resulting bathe in certain bacteria-safe
in an influx of bird zones. And as humans slowly
species (left) at reclaim the space, so does nature.
the Superfund site. Between 20 and 40 Bald Eagles
FROM LEFT: MICHELE NELIGAN; MIKE ROY/HONEYWELL
 Let It Grow
Three miles
west of Lady
Liberty, under
the smoggy New
Jersey sunset, a
peent battle rages
between two
male woodcock
and a speaker.
The architect of
this showdown is
Kathleen Farley, a
Ph.D. student at
Rutgers University.
Farley wants to
know how Amer-
ican Woodcock
are faring in
Liberty State
Park—a former
railroad terminal
that was purged of
arsenic and other
heavy metals in
the 1970s, but was
then left to grow
back on its own.
Farley is only
two years into her
survey, but so far,
her results have
proven surprising.
This past breeding
season, the wood-
cock courtship
rate in Liberty
State Park was
twice as high as
that in suburban
meadows—a sign
that industrial
stubble may offer
better resources,
she says. Next she
hopes to show
regularly winter in the lake’s Im- Audubon have also been leading concerned that buried contaminants that cleaned-
portant Bird Area, and Lajewski birding tours and counts to help will seep into it despite the lining, a up landscapes
expects the first pair to nest soon. rekindle local love for the lake. situation Lynch says Honeywell will shouldn’t require
Last year he and other scientists It’s an effort the entire have to monitor. (Three breaches further human
recorded more than 170 species of community can be proud of, says occurred between 2012 and 2014, all intervention to
wildlife in the repaired watershed, Ken Lynch, executive deputy of which have since been mended.) rebound. “If you
including Pied-billed Grebes, commissioner of the state Overall, Lynch is confident that think of how
Northern Harriers, and 78 other Department of Environmental Onondaga is bouncing back—and much we’ve
kinds of birds. Much of that re- Conservation. But the lake hasn’t Lajewski is right there with him. changed in the
surgence stems from native marsh shed its Superfund status just yet: While scanning its confluence with world, we need
and grassland planted by Audubon There are still additional sections Nine Mile Creek, Lajewski spots a more studies on
New York, Montezuma Audubon, that need to be cleaned and reveg- Great Blue Heron stalking prey in altered sites,”
Onondaga Audubon Society, etated. What’s more, the Onondaga the reeds. It’s an indicator species, Farley says. “Not
and hundreds of volunteers and Nation, which centuries ago fished he says. “These birds are telling us pristine ones.”
partners. Lajewski and Onondaga the lake’s then-pristine waters, is that the lake is coming back to life.” —Purbita Saha

FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 13

FIELD NOTES: DECOYS
Birds of a (Faux) Feather
Tucked away in a barn on the coast of Maine,
a newly converted Audubon workshop is trying
to save seabirds—one colony at a time.
BY LAURA POPPICK
n the 1970s steve kress, now
Iconservation,
Audubon’s vice president of bird
hatched a wild idea.
He had introduced Atlantic Puffin
chicks to a small, abandoned island
in Maine, but couldn’t lure them
back once they fledged and took
to the sea. So he decided to furbish
the isle with clusters of wooden
birds to make it look more invit-
ing. If successful, his efforts would
lead to the first human-restored
seabird colony in the world.
The ruse worked—over and
over again. Since Kress’s team
first deployed puffin decoys on
Eastern Egg Rock, the science
of “social attraction” has grown
14AUDUBON | FALL 2017
increasingly important to sea-
bird-revival efforts around the
world. “They find comfort sitting
in a flock, and that comfort runs
pretty deep,” Kress says. Once a
few individuals land, they become
living decoys themselves.
Kress’s work has inspired so
many global projects that con-
servation decoys have become a
bona fide business. Last winter the
owners of the leading manufacturing
company retired and donated their
26-year-old enterprise to Audu-
bon’s Seabird Restoration Program
in Bremen, Maine. The venture’s
new name, Mad River Decoys by
Audubon, nods to both groups. “It’s
cool that the production of these
things is coming back to the same
organization that pioneered their
use in the first place,” says Eric Sny-
der, the decoy production manager.
Snyder and Susan Schubel,
the decoy project manager, spent
the first season in Bremen filling
hundreds of orders from researchers
and government agencies. They’ll
fire the assembly line back up this
winter after concluding their sum-
mer work with Audubon's Seabird
Restoration Program. To create
each replica, Snyder first bakes it
out of polyethylene plastic and trims
it, then Schubel paints on faces and
feathers. “It’s artisanal decoy mak-
“It’s artisanal ing,” Schubel says. “Every step of
decoy making. the way is done by hand, with love.”
In its debut year, Mad River
Every step
of the way is Decoys by Audubon produced
more than 400 pieces representing
done by hand,
with love.” 36 different species, including
Caspian Terns and Laysan
Albatrosses. It also expanded to
offer decoy accessories such as
mirrors and sound boxes, as well
as personal consultations on social
g attraction. Schubel expects demand
STO C K-ST I L L to swell: With one-third of all sea-
Left to right: bird species facing extinction from
Clients have threats such as habitat destruction
put in orders for and dwindling prey, the need for a
Masked Boobies, tried-and-true method has grown
Snowy Plovers, even greater. Now it’s up to the
and Atlantic two-person team at the tiny one-
Puffins. stop workshop in Maine to meet it.
PHOTOS BY TRISTAN SPINSKI

Master Carver
Haruo Uchiyama wields his woodworking skills to
help visually impaired birders learn through touch.
BY MEGHAN BARTELS
warbler is smaller than
A a duck, and a duck is smaller
than a raptor. Some birders may
take these simple facts for granted,
but for those who can’t rely on
sight, a bird’s size is often tough
to fathom.
That’s what spurred Haruo
Uchiyama to create his unique
“touch carvings.” The Japanese
woodcarver, who learned the
trade from his father, has devoted
more than 35 years to sculpting
life-size birds that are accurate
down to the individual feather.
PHOTOS, FROM TOP: HARUO UCHIYAMA (3); MOLLY HAGEMANN /BERNICE PAUAHI BISHOP MUSEUM
“Blind people can hear the voices
of crows and sparrows every day,
but they don't understand how
they look or their shape or size,”
Uchiyama says through his wife
and translator, Tomoko.
Uchiyama’s current project has
him carving male-female pairs
of 40 Hawaiian honeycreeper
species—which have evolved in
a tremendous diversity of sizes,
shapes, and colors—for Hawaii’s
Bishop Museum. Uchiyama has
made five trips to Honolulu to pore
over the museum’s collection and
deliver models. Every sculpture
takes about a month; so far, he’s
completed 11 of the male birds.
Back in Uchiyama’s workshop
in Abiko, Japan, each honeycreep-
er starts as a perfectly textured
block of tupelo wood, grown in
the swamps of Louisiana, that the
artist carefully whittles into the
shape of the species. He then runs
over the rough form with a grinder
to etch the feather details and
uses piano wire to reinforce their
long, pointy beaks and delicate
feet. Finally, he paints the model,
applying about eight coats to make
the surface feel more feathery.
The sculptures are delicate,
but they’re more durable than
taxidermy. The feathers don’t fade
when put on display or deteriorate
when handled by bare hands. For
the most part, Uchiyama’s honey-
g creepers will be kept behind glass
RE L I C S at the Bishop Museum, where the
Uchiyama (below) carver hopes they can help people
is modeling 40 of understand Hawaii’s birds, as well
Hawaii’s 57 known as larger forces like evolution and
honeycreepers, conservation. But his creations will
including the ‘I’iwi eventually serve as touch carvings
(above) and some when visually impaired visitors
extinct species. stop by. To birders, the models act
The other 17 can as bridges to the unseen, Tomoko
only be found in explains. “I’m sure their world will
fossilized form. be larger than before.”
FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 15
FIELD NOTES: MIGRATION

On Our
Radar Seattle

Weather maps are a

gold mine for scientists Bismarck
shadowing birds on the
move—and birders looking
for a quick morning
forecast.
TEXT AND GRAPHICS BY
KATIE PEEK

n autumn nights in North

O America, millions of
migrating birds take to the skies Denver
unseen. As the water in their
bodies reflects radar beams,
their movements pop up on
weather maps across the country.
Meteorologists typically erase
these imprints from forecasts,
but ornithologists do the very
opposite: They mask rainstorms
and other atmospheric events
to reveal only bird activity. (It’s Los Angeles
been a practice since 1941, just
after radar technology was first
invented.) Spotting large flights,
however, is the easy part; it’s
much harder to identify which
species are actually on the move.
Now Kyle Horton, an
ornithologist at Cornell University,
is combining radar data with
eBird records to break down
these mysterious avian clouds.
When birders log sightings, they 2 A.M. EDT ON SEPTEMBER 25, 2016
clue Horton into which species The main map displays the density of
may be passing through an area, birds traveling during this time frame.
allowing him to roughly match The movements of four possible migrat- Birds collect behind a cold front pushing
patterns seen on weather maps. ing passerines, based on eBird reports east across the Great Plains. The mixture
Horton and his collaborators from the same date, appear below as of winds also shuts down southbound
plan to use their algorithms to purple inset maps. migration near the Gulf of Mexico.
define new flyways for songbirds.
(The current flyway system,
he explains, is solely based on
waterfowl migrations.) He hopes Yellow-rumped
that someday birders can wake Warbler
to maps that show them exactly Pacific Flyway
which species arrived overnight. In late September
Those tools are still several years this species was
away, but the team can already still largely on its
trace continent-scale migrations breeding grounds.
and pick out frequent flyers for It’s among the last
any given date. Here’s a look at warblers to make
what they’ve cooked up so far. moves in fall.

16AUDUBON | FALL 2017

 In this September snapshot, birds
were flying in greater numbers in the
East, yet flying faster out West.

Chicago
New York

MAIN MAP
Colors show the approximate density of
birds across the Lower 48. Stream lines
flow along the direction of travel.

FEWER MORE

The stream lines are based on radar

Charlotte observations at 138 U.S. Doppler stations.
Circles are centered at those sites.

Bigger circles mean more

birds were detected there.
Longer arrows mean those
birds were moving faster.

INSET MAPS
Ornithologists can compare national radar
data with maps showing where certain
migrants were spotted the previous day.
Houston These species-level views—based on eBird
checklists—estimate the likelihood of a
birder finding individuals on a one-hour,
Experts are making strides to filter weather kilometer-long morning walk.
out better, but some radar readings—like
FEWER MORE
the ones running through the Midwest
here—may still be artifacts of storms.

Wilson’s Warbler Swainson’s Common

Central Flyway Thrush Yellowthroat
This migrant likely Mississippi Flyway Atlantic Flyway
contributed to Known to be By early autumn,
the bright streaks furtive, this this abundant
on the main map songbird was wood warbler
over Texas and probably part of was beginning
Nebraska while en the movement to move south
route to Mexico visible in the over its massive
and beyond. Appalachians. breeding range.

SOURCES: KYLE HORTON AND FRANK LA SORTE, CORNELL LAB OF ORNITHOLOGY FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 17
 D I S PATCH

Safety Net
The only hope to save the Florida Grasshopper
Sparrow from extinction may be to remove some of
the last wild birds from the prairie to breed in captivity.
This season the race was on to collect enough
sparrows before they disappeared forever.

BY MARK JANNOT
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MAC STONE
g
IN FROM THE WILD
Field biologists recapture a
previously banded Florida
Grasshopper Sparrow at a private
ranch to bring in for captive
breeding.
 orth america’s most endangered ogy at Archbold and who was at the 2014 workshop. g
bird hardly qualifies as “charismatic “There’s a huge amount of uncertainty [with captive
N
SAFE HARBOR
megafauna.” It is not a big sexy animal, breeding]. But one thing I can tell you is certain is Clockwise from
not the kind you’d see on a state flag. It’s that if they go extinct in the wild and we don’t have a below, top: Paul
a tiny bird that lives on something in captive-breeding program, they will be extinct.” Reillo adding
central Florida called the dry prairie, which feels vast And so, in the face of a loudly ticking clock, the vegetation
when you’re standing in the middle of it but which group came to a decision, though hardly an easy one. to a sparrow
today covers maybe a tenth of its historic extent. The The official report from the workshop captured the enclosure at the
dry prairie is also home to spotted skunks, and snakes, painful ambivalence well, citing one member who Rare Species
and red imported fire ants. And sometimes cows. framed the dilemma this way: “If we set the wrong Conservatory
And an unknown but presumably growing number of course now . . . can we live with knowing that captiv- Foundation; a well-
antibiotic-resistant bacteria and parasites and other ity caused extinction? Or . . . can we live with think- hidden sparrow
pathogens. All of which are bad for the Florida Grass- ing that captivity could have saved the species if we nest on the prairie;
hopper Sparrow. When you’re just a few inches long had tried it?” The report continued: “In reality, given a newly banded
and you live for maybe four years and you’re the potato the population projections constructed by panelists, hatchling.
chip of the food chain and everybody’s out to eat you, it seems the options before the [working group] have
you’ve got troubles. very similar likelihoods of success and failure. The
Which explains why, in January 2014, a dozen [group] will be rewarded if they select an option that
members of the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow Work- succeeds and never know if there even was an option
ing Group came together to collectively gnaw at the for success if they fail.”
question of whether, under what circumstances, and The option they selected was to proceed, carefully,
in what specific ways to commence a captive-breeding with captive breeding. And for the subsequent breed-
program for what was (and is) generally recognized ing seasons, the actions taken were careful indeed.
to be the continent’s most endangered bird. The as-
sembled biologists, land managers, conservationists,
and researchers at the Archbold Biological Station in
Venus, Florida, were the very people who had been—
and would continue to be—heroically dedicated to
doing whatever could be done to save the sparrow in
the wild. But now the bird’s plunging numbers were
forcing them to consider the possibility that some-
thing more urgent needed to happen.
Let’s stipulate this: There is something funda-
mentally wrong-feeling and queasy-making about at-
tempting to save a bird from extinction by capturing
a small but significant number of its last remaining
healthy wild specimens and putting them in what
is, no matter how roomy or well-festooned with ap-
propriate vegetation, a prison. It’s the sort of Sophie’s
Choice that leaves biologists and all lovers of wildlife
feeling gutted. As one participant declared at some
point during the two-day workshop, “I would rather
have this species go extinct than to see it in a cage.”
But others in the room weren’t willing to adopt
that absolutist position. The members of the working
group were, after all, acutely mindful of—and in some
cases had experienced firsthand—the most recent pre-
vious extinction of a North American bird 30 years
ago, when the Dusky Seaside Sparrow blinked off the
landscape right here in Florida. In that case, by the
time the decision was made to deploy the last resort—
to bring some sparrows in for captive breeding—the
last resort had left the station: The only wild Dusky
Seaside Sparrows to be found were five unpaired
males, and soon the Dusky Seaside Sparrow was no
more. The Florida Grasshopper Sparrow Working
Group was determined not to repeat the mistake.
“These are wild birds; we want them in the wild,”
says Reed Bowman, who is the director of avian ecol-

20 AUDUBON | FALL 2017

When you’re just a few inches long and you live for maybe
four years and you’re the potato chip of the food chain and
everybody’s out to eat you, you’ve got troubles.

FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 21

 It’s even more of a head-scratcher when you consider that
Florida Grasshopper Sparrows do not have any issues with
reproducing. In fact, they make babies in bulk.

Most collections were made on a rescue basis, largely Three Lakes Wildlife
from nests under imminent threat of flooding, and in Management Area
that fashion two captive-breeding colonies were es-
tablished. But those specimens were mostly eggs and
hatchlings, only rarely the adult birds needed to en- FLORIDA

sure successful breeding and to school their progeny in

wild-bird behaviors. Heading into this year’s breeding
season it was again uncertain whether the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service (USFWS) would bring in the
sparrows needed to properly seed a breeding program.
But then the season’s first count of wild birds came in, Avon Park Air
and it was dire. And finally it was clear to everyone Force Range
that there was no case left to be made that captive KISSIMMEE RIVER
breeding was more likely to “cause” an extinction than
prevent one. Kissimmee
Prairie Preserve
“We’re looking at imminent extinction of the Flor- State Park
ida Grasshopper Sparrow in the wild in a year or two,”
says Paul Reillo, the founder and president of the Rare
Species Conservatory Foundation, whose Jurassic
Park about 15 miles straight west of the current U.S.
president’s winter White House is home to several
dozen critically endangered mountain bongo ante- Management area boundaries
Miles
lope, more than 80 endangered Red-browed Amazon Presettlement dry prairie landscape
parrots, and one of the two sparrow captive-breeding 0 5 10

efforts now underway. “This might be the last oppor-

tunity to build a platform for the future. This season
we’re going to grab onto whatever is left on the table.
We should save everything that has a chance of living,
because this is the last gasp for this species.”
udubon florida science coordinator
Paul Gray has been working on the
A
Florida Grasshopper Sparrow since
he arrived 22 years ago in a role that
included managing a 7,000-acre dry-
prairie sanctuary that the organization had bought
in 1980. Two years after his arrival, and after a lob-
bying campaign spearheaded by Audubon, the state
bought an adjacent 48,000-acre ranch and established
the Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park. (Audubon
sold the sanctuary to the state in 2001 to be folded
into the park.) “When the state bought the preserve,
they had hundreds of sparrows out there,” Gray says.
“And there were also three other subpopulations on
three different conservation holdings. I thought,
‘Great, we’ve saved the grasshopper sparrow! It’s
going to have enough places to live into the future.’ ”
Then the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow subpopula-
tion crashed at one of the other holdings, the Avon
Park Air Force Range just across the Kissimmee River
to the west of the park—apparently plummeting from
roughly 130 singing males in 1999 down to just 13 in
2003. “We had endless meetings and discussions and
couldn’t figure out what had happened,” Gray says.
“And then over the years the Kissimmee Prairie popu-
lation just dwindled and dwindled.”
By now, the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow has
been functionally extirpated at Kissimmee Prairie;
not a single breeding pair was found there this year.
At Avon Park the tiniest of subpopulations some- g
how persists, with five males this year (two of which PREDATOR-
remained bachelors). A private ranch (which the PROOFING
USFWS requests not be identified) hosts a compara-
Clockwise from
bly puny subpopulation; the field techs who monitor top: Field techs
the place counted five mated pairs this summer, plus Natalie Sweeting
a dozen unpaired males. Which leaves Three Lakes (foreground)
Wildlife Management Area, a 63,487-acre expanse and Rebecca
of pristine habitat intensively and beautifully man- Windsor clear
aged on the sparrows’ behalf by the Florida Fish and away grasses
Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). But around a new
Three Lakes is bottoming out, too: This season it nest-protection
looks like it will have been home to no more than 16 fence; classic
sparrow pairs. dry prairie at
The kind of population decline Gray describes Three Lakes; the
is not the way things typically work out there in the sparrows’ coloring
natural world, at least absent some obvious and ca- keeps them well-
lamitous cause. And it’s even more of a head-scratcher camouflaged.
when you consider that Florida Grasshopper Spar-
rows do not have any issues with reproducing. In
fact, they make babies in bulk. From the time they
build their first nest of the season in, say, mid-April
to their final effort at outlasting the rain sometime in
August, a single breeding pair can produce as many
as five clutches of eggs, three to five eggs in a clutch.
That’s potentially 25 offspring a year; in order for the
population to increase, just three of them—12 per-
cent—need to successfully incubate, hatch, fledge, and
survive the winter. Even so, the population continues
its inexorable fall.
Over the years, and recently with ever-greater

22 AUDUBON | FALL 2017 MAP BY MIKE REAGAN

FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 23
urgency and ingenuity, USFWS field biologists and
their land-manager partners have responded to the
dizzying array of predatory and climatic perils the
sparrows face by developing an equally dizzying ar-
mamentarium of interventions, up to and including
transforming each newly discovered nest into a little
fenced compound on the prairie.
The constant state of high alert, combined with
the all-too-frequent incidence of nests failing any-
way, can lead to heartbreak and burnout. Just listen
to USFWS recovery biologist Sandra Sneckenberger,
who has been engaged in the Florida Grasshopper
Sparrow work out of the Service’s Vero Beach office
since 2008, describe the 2016 breeding season: “Last
year the birds started nesting, and we got this huge
deluge of rain, so we lost all those. Pretty much every
bird’s first clutch: gone. They start again right away,
make a new nest, lay eggs. Second rainstorm: gone.
That happened three times last year. After the first
time, we put in monitoring wells so we knew where
the water table was on the landscape. We lifted
nests—figured out how to use shovels and a little dirt
to lift nests up just enough so the birds wouldn’t know
we’d done anything. Everybody had a portable incu-
bator for eggs. One time I’m with the crew grabbing
eggs and there’s lightning striking all around us. At
the ranch we’d install fences against mammal preda-
tors and snakes, and an electrical fence around that
24 AUDUBON | FALL 2017
because of cows. Still—with all that—as soon as the
eggs hatch and there’s a nice fleshy body, fire ants eat
it. Out of 20 nests at the ranch last year there was one
nest that made it. Every other one, it got predated at
the egg stage or the crew came upon it after it got
mauled by ants. You go through all that work and see
that carnage repetitively—it gets to you. My dentist
knows that it’s sparrow season because my gums bleed
so bad because I’m stressed out so much. You’re always
on call and you’re doing a bunch of work and trying
so hard, and you can’t help but get attached to these
birds. The birds are trying so hard to make it happen.
The birds won’t give up.”
aul reillo is a tall, wiry guy, all g
angles and elbows; he lopes across the
P
MECHANICAL
Rare Species compound shifting from NEST
one urgent task to the next, tattered off- A hatchling
white Rare Species Conservatory Foun- shares an
dation T-shirt swinging loosely from his coat-hanger incubator at
shoulders. (It’s hard to tell whether his wardrobe fea- Reillo’s home
tures just one RSCF shirt that he wears every day, or with “day one
multiple clones, each dotted with a similar smatter- eggs” that were
ing of dirt and sweat.) Today is June 27, deep into the deposited outside
breeding season, and Reillo is beginning, finally, the the nest and
process of building sparrow enclosures. neglected by their
If you’re going to bring in wild, critically endan- parents shortly
gered birds, you need to have specially made enclo- after being laid.
He opened one of the two incubators parked in the closet that spanned
one wall and proceeded to manually nudge-turn a dozen or so jelly-bean–
size eggs that looked so fragile they could have been spun from sugar.

sures—big enough to give them some semblance of

wilderness and sufficient room for foraging; situated
outside for acclimation purposes yet protected against
incursions from predatory snake and pathogen-
carrying insect alike; planted with appropriate grass-
land ground cover so that fledglings feel at home. Also
they can’t cost too much. And of course now that time
is getting short, they need to be simple enough that
they can be built quickly under serious time constraint.
The simple schematic Reillo has designed is a 6 x
6 x 12-foot frame with a staple-gun-secured floor of
galvanized quarter-inch wire mesh and five other sides
wrapped in a stretchy superscreen guaranteed (as long
as you get the fairings right) to keep out the critters you
want kept out. Take three of those frames and arrange
them at right angles out on the lawn behind the open
carport bays where we’re making these things, slap a
prefab steel screen door on each and connect the three
via a foyer that functions as an airlock against escape
and unnecessary human contact, carpet the enclosures
with soil and greenery, and voilà!—you’ve got a sparrow
collection/breeding pod. Make two of those, to accom-
modate the six family units slated (weather and preda-
tors permitting) to be brought in, and do all of this with
a cobbled-together crew of USFWS rogues, local art-
ists, a journalist, and a couple of field techs from Kis-
simmee Prairie—who don’t really have any sparrows to
look after anyway—each of whom shows up whenever
they manage to carve out the time to do so.
Meanwhile, the insanely focused and iterative
breeding work itself must go on. When I met Reillo
for the first time, after he and his wife, Karen, had
welcomed me to their house on the Rare Species com-
pound, he took me into a small side room—in a more
normal home, it might have been an office—where
he had an important twice-daily task to perform. He out just what it takes, what that magical set of nest- g
opened one of the two incubators parked in the closet approximating conditions might be that will cultivate, NET GAIN
that spanned one wall and proceeded to manually not kill, the sparrow embryos within. But success had USFWS recovery
nudge-turn a dozen or so jelly-bean–size eggs that eluded him so far. biologist Sandra
looked so fragile they could have been spun from sugar. The reason this maddening stumble toward repli- Sneckenberger
These were “day one” eggs, Reillo explained: eggs that cating nature’s methods is even necessary in this par- positions a mist
had been brought in to this mechanical simulacrum of ticular instance is that these eggs were the progeny of net to collect
a nest—with its metal rollers that rotate the eggs on last season’s hand-reared captives, not of the experi- adult Florida
a precise but perhaps overly regular schedule and its enced, proven wild adult breeding pairs that are the Grasshopper
temperature that can be calibrated down to the hun- optimal founders of a captive-breeding colony. (The Sparrows for
dredth of the Celsius degree—within hours of being unschooled first-time mothers had laid the eggs and breeding.
laid, before they could benefit for even a day from the then dumped them outside the nest and never both-
far more nuanced knowledge of a mother sparrow sit- ered with them again.) But this is the fundamental
ting and jostling and creating the optimal conditions nature of embarking on such an effort with a species
for incubation in an actual nest. that has never been bred in captivity before. Nothing
Reillo and his colleagues have gotten the incuba- is known in advance; everything must get figured out
tion protocols refined up to a point: Give them an along the way.
egg that’s been in a nest under a female sparrow for A week after I was introduced to the day-one eggs,
three days and they’ll take it through the remainder of Reillo managed to get one to hatch. Two days later,
the 11-day incubation period and successfully hatch he hatched another: He’d cracked the nut. (Ultimately
it pretty much every time. But they had yet to hatch a dozen of the eggs hatched.) The temperature they
a day-one egg. Reillo had been obsessively tweak- already knew works to incubate eggs from day four
ing the various factors he can control—temperature, onward is 37.65°C; the temperature that gets them
rotation, air circulation, humidity—trying to figure Continued on page 50

FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 25

FLOCK TOGETHER
Birds for the
Battle-worn
Former soldier Robert Vallières found solace
by working with raptors. Now he’s using his
expertise to help other struggling veterans.
BY PURBITA SAHA
PHOTOGRAPHY BY TONY LUONG
T
he first bird that saved
Robert Vallières was a
Black Hawk helicopter. It
was October 1990, and the
then 28-year-old Army soldier
was serving in the Persian Gulf
War. While riding in the back
of a truck on a mission to fortify
a foxhole in the remote Arabian
Desert, a heavy beam slammed
into him, sending him flying and
causing severe head injuries and
swelling in the brain. The chopper
sped Vallières to a field hospital
for emergency care. He was later
taken to the U.S. Navy Ship
Comfort, where he was stabilized,
and then transferred to the Walter
Reed Army Medical Center in
Washington, D.C., to undergo
heart and arterial surgery.
After being honorably
discharged, Vallières returned
to Concord, New Hampshire.
While he appeared to be on the
26 AUDUBON | FALL 2017
mend, he continued to grapple
with chest spasms and Gulf War
Syndrome—the mysterious mix of
symptoms, including headaches,
exhaustion, and memory prob-
lems, that plagued up to a third
of returning veterans. On top of
that, he had lingering effects from
a pre-deployment aneurysm, and
was diagnosed with post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD), a condi-
tion that experts estimate afflicts
about two million members of the
military. The PTSD led to serious
depression and horrific anger, he
says. He was overwhelmed with
trying to readapt to civilian life
when he saw a newspaper ad for a
birding trip in the White Moun-
tains. Remembering his hikes
with his nature-loving father, also
a veteran,Vallières signed up
immediately. Up on the slopes,
as he scanned the leafy ledges for
passerines, a Peregrine Falcon
g
S H OW A N D T E L L
Vallières brings a raptor when he
speaks to veterans about how birds
helped his recovery. When asked
the worth of this owl, he told the
vet: “I can’t put a value on it.”

FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 27

FLOCK TOGETHER
hurtled into view, seizing a North-
ern Flicker mid-air in a puff of
feathers. He followed it back to a
snag, where it tore the woodpecker
apart, yellow shaft after yellow
shaft. “I was glued,” Vallières says.
“I had just come back from war.”
Vallières credits that Peregrine
with saving him from despair. The
encounter sparked a full-fledged
birding obsession that ultimately
helped shape his philosophy on
healing. He quickly signed on to
monitor raptor nests with New
Hampshire Audubon. The first
site he claimed was Joe Eng-
lish Hill, near Concord, where
he and his son Andrew would
watch American Kestrels speed
rodents to their begging chicks’
mouths. As his identification and
observational skills deepened, his
responsibilities multiplied. He
began tracking breeding Peregrine
Falcons and Bald Eagles, aiding
in the recognition of an uptick
in chicks that confirms the birds’
nationwide resurgence since the
pesticide DDT was banned.
Vallières finds strength and hope
in their comeback. “They keep my
defeats in perspective,” he says.
And, he discovered, while pain-
killers reduced his chronic pain,
his ailments often temporarily
vanished in the presence of birds.
Besides taking his mind off
the hurt, tracking wild birds also
allowed Vallières to beat back
depression and regain much of his
physical strength. Most mornings
he’d be up early, hiking along a
train line to check on a female
eagle he once tagged, or kayak-
ing across a lake to look for new
hatchlings. After volunteering
with New Hampshire Audubon
for a few seasons, he felt he could
do more. He began rehabilitating
raptors, first with Audubon, then
with the local wildlife hospital
Wings of Dawn, where he learned
to train unreleasable birds as
educational ambassadors. Working
with the feathered charges allowed
him to pay forward the care and
kindness he’d received from doc-
tors, nurses, and therapists, he
says. It also made him feel like less
of a burden.
Given the profoundly soothing
28 AUDUBON | FALL 2017
effect raptors had on Vallières,
he was motivated to share the
experience. He brought other vets
to the New Hampshire Audubon
hawkwatch platform to take in
thousands of Broad-wingeds
during fall migration. He cowrote
a memoir, Wounded Warriors,
about his experiences in battle
and birding. And he started
bringing rehab birds to the New
Hampshire Veterans Home and
Manchester VA Medical Center.
(Vallières is a patient at the latter,
receiving therapy for his chronic
pain, taking drawing lessons to re-
lieve stress, and learning cognitive
exercises to combat memory loss
from a second aneurysm in 2012.)
On the Friday before Memorial
Day, Vallières made his rounds at
both facilities. In the solarium of
the medical center that morn-
ing he saluted each of the 15
seniors, many in wheelchairs and
Vietnam and Korean War caps.
Then he introduced a male Great
Horned Owl that is permanently
grounded due to a wing injury.
Vallières walked around with
the raptor on his arm, lifting it
above the veterans’ heads so they
could feel the rush of its beating
feathers. The room buzzed with
questions and anecdotes of pet
cockatoos; placid faces broke into
grins. With his audience trans-
fixed, Vallières related his story.
He showed them sketches he has
drawn of being airlifted out of
Kuwait, shared dark reflections
of his struggle with PTSD, and
explained the important role that
birds have played in his recovery.
His openness is remarkable,
says Laura Shannon, the recre-
ational therapist at Manchester
VA Medical Center. “It’s not
always cool in military culture to
show your weakness,” she says.
“But Robert enables others” by
baring his struggles.
Exposure to birds and other
wildlife can be an invaluable part
of the healing process, especially
when it comes to members of the
military, says Stephanie Westlund,
a post-conflict recovery expert
and author. “Intimate contact
with nature, as well as social
contact with other veterans, help
g to imbue life with new or remem-
TO O L S O F bered meaning,” Westlund adds.
THE TRADE That was certainly the case for
A few of the at least one attendee at the after-
items that Val- noon session in the vet home. P.J.
lières often has Audett recalled how, after serving
in tow when he during the Vietnam War, he built
visits with vets, hundreds of Wood Duck nesting
opposite from boxes around New Hampshire to
top left: a feather bolster populations for conserva-
from a wild Per- tion and hunting. “Robert’s talks
egrine; the mitt bring me back to that peaceful
he wears when life,” he says. “I wish there were
handling raptors; more programs like his.”
Nikon binoculars; Vallières is well aware that the
a carving of a kes- nation’s 168 medical centers for
trel that he made veterans have long been under-
out of wood. funded and understaffed. He’s
hopeful that his visits make at
least a small difference for some
seeking treatment. “These people
are stuck in this alleyway created
by the country,” Vallières says.
“They need a moment to get
away from their problems and
their pain.” He knows because
he does, too. Whenever the toll
on his body and mind weighs too
heavy, he picks up his binoculars
and steps into his yard, seeking
the comfort and company of the
birds that call it home. A
FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 29
 LETTER FROM
THE GULF

THE
FIRST
LINE OF
DEFENSE
Funds from the
Deepwater Horizon oil
spill are flowing into
Louisiana, financing
unprecedented
restoration along its
beleaguered coast—
just in the nick of time.

BY JUSTIN NOBEL

g DISAPPEARING ACT
The newly restored Caminada
Headland, a 13-mile-long
barrier island system that
buffers the Louisiana coast
from tropical storms.

30 AUDUBON | FALL 2017

 | AUDUBON
PHOTO
FALL 2017 31
BY BEN DEPP
Louisiana’s barrier islands don’t look like much. Dozens
of the long, narrow masses form a loose chain around
the state’s southeastern coastline, and many rise only a
couple of feet above the surface of the ocean. Erosion is
an inevitable foe for any sandy expanse, but in recent years
these islands have begun to contract at an alarming rate—so
quickly that the thousands-year-old features may disappear
entirely by the end of the century. Losing these wisps of
land would be disastrous. Without them, powerful storms
would slam coastal towns, seaports, and wetlands. The calm
waters behind their protective front would vanish, and with
them the nurseries where fish, shrimp, crab, and oysters
reproduce and raise their young, and where 100 million birds
live, nest, or stop to rest and refuel on their long-haul flights
during migration.
Louisiana is in a race against time, says Gov-
ernor John Bel Edwards. “If we don’t restore these
barrier islands, then our future is in peril,” he told
me. “That land is the first line of defense. What
we cannot have is a situation where the Gulf of
Mexico is lapping at the levees of New Orleans.”
The causes of this vanishing act are many and
familiar. Oil- and gas-industry canals have frag-
mented coastal wetlands, allowing salt water to
surge inland and setting the islands adrift from the
coasts they typically hug. The channelization of
the Mississippi River has starved wetlands of sedi-
ment, their basic building block, and carried much
of the sand that would otherwise be growing bar-
rier islands deep into the Gulf of Mexico. What’s
more, Louisiana’s coast is naturally subsiding while
sea levels are rising; water is creeping up half an
inch a year, relentlessly devouring more shoreline.
g New Orleans. Here a large branch of the Mississippi
BEFORE AND AFTER
East Grand Terre Island,
located at the mouth of
Barataria Bay, in 2006
(top) and in 2015, after
the restoration of 2.8
miles of shoreline.
32 AUDUBON | FALL 2017
And then there are the numerous storms and the
BP oil spill, which have battered the islands. As
the climate continues to warm, sea level here is
projected to rise more than 6.5 feet by 2100, and
more intense storms will tear away at the islands,
causing the growing watery maw of the Gulf of
Mexico to expand, leaving the coast, and its inhab-
itants, increasingly exposed.
After years of uncoordinated efforts to stem
coastal land loss, Louisiana now has a master plan.
The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority
(CPRA), formed in 2005 in response to the vicious
pummeling from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, has
created a detailed restoration agenda, the latest it-
eration of which the state legislature approved in
June. Two of the plan’s most critical components
involve rebuilding barrier island systems and inten-
tionally engineering cuts in the Mississippi River’s
levee system to allow the great sediment-laden
river to replenish and rebuild coastal wetlands. It’s
a colossal undertaking, and the largest coastal res-
toration project in American history. Re-engineering
Louisiana’s vast barrier islands and wetlands, and
constructing other protective infrastructure such as
flood walls and levees, will cost $50 billion or more
over the next 50 years.
In an ironic twist, the 2010 BP oil spill has en-
abled this astronomically expensive plan to begin
to be put into action. Louisiana will receive $7.1
billion for restoration work from the fines paid by
those responsible for Deepwater Horizon, which
killed 11 people and released 4.9 million barrels
of crude into the Gulf. There are several fund-
ing streams related to the disaster, including more
than $810 million in RESTORE Act funds, some
of which will begin flowing this year, $5 billion
from the Natural Resource Damage Assessment
(NRDA), and nearly $1.3 billion from the Nation-
al Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s (NFWF) Gulf
Environmental Benefit Fund.
Louisiana has already started restoration work,
making use of BP oil-spill funds and other re-
sources. Leaders know that everything is on the line.
“Our actions over the next two decades,” reads the
master plan, “will decide whether Louisiana’s coast
survives.” Its survival is important not just to local
people and wildlife. Any American who puts gaso-
line in her car, uses plastic, or eats shrimp is utilizing
a product that may well have been extracted, forged,
or harvested in coastal Louisiana. Without a healthy
barrier island system, all of this is at risk.
At a remote Louisiana marine lab, coastal geologist
Alex Kolker opens Google Maps and describes how
the state’s barrier islands came to be. He zooms in
on South Pass, located about 100 miles southeast of
enters the Gulf of Mexico. The fresh water slows
as it hits the ocean, Kolker explains, and heavier
sediment, such as sand, drops out, creating a massive
pile. Wind and waves batter the pile into a long, thin
line. “This is your proto-barrier island,” says Kolker.
(It’s also one of the few places in Louisiana where
the Mississippi is still building land.)
 Over a few hundred years a proto-barrier island
grows into a mature barrier island with a wide beach,
a strip of dunes, and a back marsh. The Mississippi’s
ability to deposit sediment and sand has literally built
southeastern Louisiana, both its coastal wetlands and
its barrier islands. About once every thousand years
the river naturally shifts course, sending its sediment
down a new path. Once the river moves, the marshes
and islands along the old path start eroding into the
sea. Historically, the river built land in the newly
opened area and Louisiana kept growing, but the
Army Corps of Engineers and others have clogged
the Mississippi with dams and locks, and dikes and
levees have helped funnel its rich sediment out to
sea, rather than letting it accumulate along the coast.
“Barring a zombie apocalypse, I don’t see us going
back to a natural state at any point in the foreseeable
millennia,” says Kolker. “The fact is, humans are the
major driver of natural processes on the planet today.”
Louisiana’s master plan recognizes that reality.
“We know our coast is going to change, so we have
two choices,” says Bren Haase, a chief developer of
the plan. “We can allow it to degrade and fall apart
and have that dictate where we live and what we
do on our coast, or we can manage that change—
and that is what we are attempting to do.”
The CPRA is presently undertaking projects on
Louisiana’s Barataria Basin Barrier Island Chain
and headlands. The total cost will be roughly half
OPPOSITE: PHOTOS BY DIGITAL GLOBE/U.S.G.S./GOOGLE EARTH; GOOGLE EARTH. THIS PAGE: PHOTO BY BEN DEPP
g in toxic black gunk. Then, in 2012, Hurricane Isaac
BUILT ANEW
Constructing more than
1,000 acres of new barrier,
dune, and beach habitat
on Elmer’s Island involved
bringing in 9 million cubic
yards of sand.
a billion dollars, and all funds come from BP oil-
spill fines—$7.3 million from RESTORE; $153.6
million from the NFWF; $318 million from the
NRDA. Hundreds of millions of cubic yards of
sand, collected offshore, will rebuild beaches,
dunes, and back-barrier marsh habitats (see “Re-
storing Barrier Islands,” p. 34), enabling these is-
lands to once again serve as substantial buffers.
In March the CPRA completed its largest barrier
island restoration project yet, at Caminada Head-
land. This 13-mile-long barrier island system of-
fers crucial protection for the neighboring oil port,
Fourchon, and includes Elmer’s Island, a popular
beach for anglers and birders. Though Caminada
was outside Hurricane Katrina’s destruction zone,
Elmer’s Island was pummeled by Hurricane Rita in
2005 and again by Hurricane Gustav in 2008. In
2010 oil from BP’s leaking Macondo well washed
ashore, lacing beaches with gooey oil tar balls the
diameter of tea plates and choking the back marshes
hit. These events devastated the headland. Hur-
ricane waves and storm surges devoured beaches,
causing extensive shoreline loss, and mighty winds
and surges yanked apart wetlands.
On a hot April morning, I arrive at Elmer’s
Island to search for Wilson’s Plovers. I join Audu-
bon Louisiana’s director of bird conservation, Erik
FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 33
 clay decoy and a smartphone recording of a chick
Restoring Barrier Islands ILLUSTRATION BY KATIE PEEK in distress. They mist-net and band the duo as part
of their work to track the plover population as the
newly restored beach matures. “The overarching
question is: How do individual birds and their local
populations respond to the new habitat created by
1 the coastal restoration?” says Johnson. Over the
course of the breeding season, his team will record
In many instances a barrier island has eroded away to little more than a sand bar.
The dunes have disappeared, and little, if any, vegetation remains.
some 500 Least Tern nesting pairs and 30 nesting
Wilson’s Plover pairs on this restored beach.
If you rebuild barrier island dunes, the birds, it
seems, will come. Yet that herculean effort alone
isn’t enough to ensure they thrive. Johnson spots
coyote tracks in the same area of the marsh where
2 we’re banding plovers. “Nest success last year here
Sand is pumped in to build beach and dune, and a temporary dike is installed to was absolutely terrible,” he says. “We very much at-
contain the marsh on the coastal side (right) of the island until it fills in naturally. tributed that to coyote predation of eggs.” To avoid
the same fate this season, Bolinger and Averhart
will set up nearly a half-mile of electric fencing
around areas, and spend countless hours restaking
the posts that fall over in the slippery sand. They’ll
3 also talk to hundreds of beachgoers about the im-
portance of respecting the fenced-off areas, and
Muddy sediment is pumped in to create the back marsh, and then grasses and
aquatic vegetation are planted.
making sure their dogs do, too. When the birds are
young and fragile, every little bit helps.

Johnson, and two seasonal coastal technicians,

Sarah Bolinger and Melinda Averhart. Audubon
Louisiana helped advise which projects the master
plan should prioritize, based on factors like where
migrating birds forage and breed, and its shorebird
surveys will help gauge how birds respond to the
restoration work. On this spring day, plovers are
just arriving from their mysterious Central Amer-
ican wintering grounds, and Johnson’s crew is
looking for mating pairs to band; the Least Terns
they’ll also monitor are still en route. “Before the
restoration, we would have been up to our chests
in water,” says Johnson, gesturing at the expansive
beach we’re standing on.
The $216 million project was funded largely
through criminal fines paid by BP and Transocean,
owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Work-
ers dredged 9 million cubic yards of sand from a
shoal 30 miles offshore, barged it to the coast, and
pumped it by pipe onto the beach, creating 1,059
acres of new barrier, dune, and beach habitat.
Johnson shows me how the seven-foot-tall dunes
are expanding, thanks to fencing that traps sand.
He points to a wide sandflat behind the dunes
that leads into a rich marshland. Reddish Egrets,
decimated by plume hunters in the late 1800s but
now staging a comeback thanks to Audubon-
led conservation efforts, run swiftly through the
shallows, leaping into the air, and stabbing fish.
Seaside Sparrows, Clapper Rails, Tricolored Her-
ons, and Common Nighthawks nest in the back
marsh, where they dine on abundant shore crabs,
spiders, and other marine life invertebrates, and, in
the case of the nighthawks, flying insects.
“Where the beach meets the marsh is the area
that plovers love,” says Johnson, indicating the
wide sandflat. Sure enough, later that morning
they attract a pair of plovers, using a homemade
“THE OVERARCHING
QUESTION IS: HOW
DO INDIVIDUAL
BIRDS AND THEIR
LOCAL POPULATIONS
RESPOND TO THE NEW
HABITAT CREATED
BY THE COASTAL
RESTORATION?”
g will be located on the east bank of the Mississippi,
CHICK PATROL
Audubon Lousiana wildlife
techs Sarah Bolinger (left)
and Melinda Averhart
monitor birds on newly
restored beaches, like
this Least Tern chick on
Elmer’s Island.
Every angler has his favorite spot. Jerry Gonzales’s
is beside a fallen tree trunk on a back bayou 30 min-
utes from downtown New Orleans. To get there we
drive east on St. Claude Avenue, passing a popular
neighborhood dance studio and a string of new res-
taurants before crossing over a canal and continu-
ing through the Lower 9th Ward, the New Orleans
neighborhood famous for its music—Fats Domino
grew up there—as well as devastating flooding dur-
ing Hurricane Katrina. We cross rural, swampy St.
Bernard Parish on a local highway, turn off on a
rural road, and park. We follow a faint footpath
through dense brush to Gonzales’s log. “I love it out
here,” he tells me, taking in a deep lungful of fresh
air. He comes to escape the noise and bustle of the
city, and to catch local favorites like redfish, speck-
led trout, drum, and sheepshead, much of which
he brings back to give to friends in the Faubourg
Marigny, a picturesque 200-year-old neighborhood
that borders the French Quarter.
This is the New Orleans way, it is the Louisi-
ana way, and as the state’s coast slips into the sea,
it is a way of life that is very much in jeopardy. The
marshes near Gonzales’s fishing spot are falling
victim to Louisiana’s epic disappearing act, slowly
eroding into Breton Sound. Saving the sound, and
nearby Barataria Bay, is one of the more ambitious
parts of the entire master plan.
The proposed Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion
about 30 miles downriver from New Orleans, and
68 miles above Head of Passes, where the river
breaks off into three separate flows that carry it out
into the Gulf of Mexico. The project will create a
controlled gateway in the Mississippi River levee
system, allowing a portion of the river’s sediment-
laden flow—35,000 cubic feet per second, or about
6 percent of the Mississippi’s discharge—to flow

34 AUDUBON | FALL 2017

PHOTOS BY MIKE FERNANDEZ/AUDUBON FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 35
out into Breton Sound, whose coastal wetlands
are fracturing into oblivion. Breton Sound has lost
more than 160 square miles of land since 1932, and
as locals will tell you time and again, what used to
be marsh is now water. The diversion will introduce
an estimated 70 million tons of new sediment over
a 50-year period, serving as the foundation for the
formation of thousands of acres of new wetlands.
These wetlands will be habitat for the crabs and fish
that anglers like Gonzales prize, as well as pelicans,
terns, gulls, herons, egrets, ducks, and other water-
birds, and provide robust hurricane protection for
adjacent inland areas, including New Orleans.
Another proposed project, the Mid-Barataria
Sediment Diversion, will build a gated structure into
the west bank levee of the Mississippi, a few miles
south of the Breton diversion. It will channel a small
portion of the river into Barataria Bay, which has lost
more than 455,000 square miles of coastal wetlands
since 1932.
Together the two diversion projects will cost $2
billion. They will create or maintain as much as
47,000 acres of wetlands and land, and reduce land
loss by up to 65 percent. Projects of this scope are
achievable due to the huge pot of money Louisi-
ana is slated to receive from the BP oil spill. “This
is the first time we will be able to implement such
large-scale coastal projects, and really start re-
building land in Louisiana,” says Audubon Loui-
siana communications manager Lauren Bourg.
Governor Edwards is pushing to start the di-
version projects as soon as possible. In March he
sent a letter to President Trump requesting that he
expedite the Mid-Breton and Barataria diversions,
as well as three other CPRA projects, all of which
cut through a federal levee and require special per-
mits. Fast-tracking would make the projects top
priorities for regulatory agencies, spurring them to
carry out necessary environmental and structural
reviews promptly. “With fast-tracking, these proj-
ects could take two to three years to get approval,”
says Audubon Louisiana deputy director Cynthia
Duet. Otherwise they could take many years lon-
ger—time Louisiana doesn’t have. Trump has yet
to respond to the governor’s request.
Nor has Trump seemed supportive of Amer-
ica’s coastlines. For Louisiana’s master plan to
succeed, the state will need money beyond the
BP-related funding streams. That means counting
on annually recurring funding pots, such as state
mineral fees, which provide about $25 million a
year, and Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act
Wilson’s Plover
Scientific Name:
Charadrius wilsonia
Range: Widespread in
coastal regions from
southeastern United
States and western
Mexico to South America,
including most islands in
the Caribbean. With-
36 AUDUBON | FALL 2017
Hurricane Harvey
As Audubon went to press,
Hurricane Harvey hit Texas
very near to a number of
barrier islands and bird
rookeries managed or
maintained by Audubon
Texas, but it was too
early to safely assess the
damage in time for our
deadline. To see updates
on what Audubon and
its partners are doing to
recover after the storm, go
to audubon.org/Harvey.
draws from northernmost
parts of range in winter.
Habitat: Strictly coastal,
in areas with little or
no vegetation, such as
beaches and tidal flats.
Status: Not abundant
anywhere, but very
widespread. Thought to
be declining in the United
(GOMESA) offshore oil revenues that bring in
an estimated $176 million per year that Louisi-
ana designates to fund coastal restoration, protec-
tion, and infrastructure activities. GOMESA was
on the chopping block under the White House’s
proposed budget for 2018. Many Louisiana leg-
islators vocally opposed the cut; GOMESA was
preserved in the House version of the budget, but
it’s a fight that the Louisiana Congressional del-
egation will likely face when next year’s budget
comes up. “Coastal restoration is a top-tier issue
in Louisiana,” says Brian Moore, Audubon’s vice
president of Gulf of Mexico policy. “It’s as impor-
tant as taxes and gun control.”
Architects of the master plan are moving full
steam ahead while they have the political sup-
port and money. Every barrier island restored and
coastal wetland revived provides that much more
wildlife habitat, and that much more protection
against storms, and makes the commerce and
goods and ecosystems and people of the state that
much safer.
In late June, tropical storm Cindy started creeping
toward the Gulf Coast. Initially it looked as though
it might bloom into a full-fledged hurricane and
pound Elmer’s Island. Erik Johnson was fraught.
The newly restored dunes stood only about seven
feet above sea level at their highest point; many
Least Terns and Wilson’s Plovers were nesting
lower. “Tropical Storm Cindy is bearing down on
Louisiana, and all of the coastal beaches are flood-
ing with storm surge,” Johnson emailed me late on
June 21. “Our coastal biologists on Grand Isle and
in Cameron Parish, as well as staff at our Rainey
Sanctuary, have evacuated because of tornado
threats and high water, putting cars and property
at risk. . . . Sadly, we’re anticipating nearly complete
failure of our beach-nesting birds.” Early on June
22, Cindy came ashore near Cameron, Louisiana.
The storm wasn’t nearly as devastating as pre-
dicted. Maximum sustained winds were 40 mph,
barely strong enough to categorize Cindy as a
tropical storm, and the storm surge maxed out at
four feet high. Still, Elmer’s was hit hard. When
the techs, Bolinger and Averhart, returned five
days later, after the flooding receded, they saw that
untold tons of recently added sand had washed
into the ocean. Powerful wind and waves had
wiped out the electric fencing they’d installed only
a month and a half before. Yet the storm didn’t
completely wipe out the chicks, as Johnson had
States. Little informa- and some beach areas can
tion on population trends be protected from casual
elsewhere. human disturbance, but
Threats /Outlook: not from effects of oil
Development in beach spills and other pollu-
and dune areas reduces tion. In the long term, sea
available habitat. Nesting level rise threatens most
activities are subject to of the current range.
disruption by beachgoers.
Isolated barrier islands
 AUDUBON IN ACTION

Bird Conservation Across the Gulf

Audubon’s commitment to protecting birds in the Gulf of
Mexico started well before the Deepwater Horizon disas-
ter and stretches far beyond Louisiana: It’s a century-long
effort spanning all five Gulf states. Since the BP oil spill,
the organization has played an important part in ensuring
that the restoration funds stemming from the catastro-
phe benefit birds and the coastal habitat on which they
depend. From advocating for key conservation projects to
undertaking ambitious avian surveys to restoring breeding
sites, Audubon is helping birds across the Gulf recover
and thrive. —Andy McGlashen

ALABAMA Audubon is also monitor-

Birmingham Audubon is
partnering with the state
to launch a coastal bird
monitoring and steward-
ship program that trains
volunteers coordinated
by Mobile Bay Audubon
to keep watch over key
nesting sites for prior-
ity birds along 20 miles
of Gulf coastline.
Birds that benefit:
Red Knot, Short-billed
Dowitcher, Snowy Plover
feared. A quarter of the tern chicks and 67 percent
of the young plovers survived. Other sites suffered
ANY AMERICAN
WHO PUTS GASOLINE
FLORIDA
far worse losses; in some cases, the storm wiped Audubon Florida and local
out every youngster. Survival at Elmer’s may have IN HER CAR, USES chapters are involved in
been due to the recent restoration: The higher ele- PLASTIC, OR EATS 283 coastal restoration
vation from the new sand may have provided more
protection to the birds and their nests.
SHRIMP IS UTILIZING projects. In addition to
ing birds in some project
areas, such as the 800
acres of newly created and
enhanced beach and dune
at Caminada Headland.
Birds that benefit: Least
Tern, Seaside Sparrow,
Wilson’s Plover
MISSISSIPPI
With the help of more
than 200 volunteers who
participate in its coastal
stewardship programs,
Audubon Mississippi leads
ongoing efforts to monitor
shorebirds at 17 sites along
30 miles of coastline, pro-
tect critical waterbird habi-
tat, and educate beachgo-

In the following weeks they watched as Least A PRODUCT THAT monitoring and research,
the organization used
ers about ways to protect
vulnerable birds, such as
Terns began nesting anew, later in the season than MAY WELL HAVE BEEN restoration funds to keeping dogs on-leash and
Johnson has ever witnessed. The plovers were EXTRACTED, FORGED, purchase and protect the avoiding nesting areas.
done for the year. But Black Skimmers, which OR HARVESTED IN last privately held piece of Birds that benefit: Least
haven’t historically nested on the island, began
showing up after Cindy. First a handful, then
COASTAL LOUISIANA. Lanark Reef—a pristine,
bird-rich barrier island off
Tern, Piping Plover,
Wilson’s Plover
dozens arrived, perhaps because the far-offshore the Panhandle—and to
islands they nest on were too flooded to return to. save habitat from erosion TEXAS
Whatever the case, by late July some three dozen by installing an artificial Audubon Texas protects
skimmer pairs had scraped out nests on the bat- reef at Tampa’s Alafia rookery islands that
tered beach, taking a second chance. Bank Bird Sanctuary, part provide nesting habitat
Cindy showed the fragility of Louisiana’s barrier of the Hillsborough Bay for many birds, including
islands, where an additional foot of sand can make Important Bird Area. 60 percent of the state’s
the difference between an island being washed out Birds that benefit: Black Reddish Egrets and 75
and retaining some dry ground—which, in turn, Skimmer, Piping Plover, percent of its Ameri-
can be the difference between life and death for a Roseate Spoonbill can Oystercatchers. In
young bird. Storms will keep coming, and they’ll Matagorda Bay, where
tear away at the land; it’s only natural. But if we LOUISIANA just two of 16 historical
build more resilience into the system, it will give g In the state hit hardest nesting sites still provide
the coast—and the wildlife and infrastructure it COAST GUARD by the BP spill, Audubon significant breeding
supports—a far better shot at survival. And so the Erik Johnson (top) bands Louisiana has advocated habitat for birds, Audubon
fight for Louisiana’s coast continues. It must. A an adult Least Tern. He for and had a hand in ad- is working to identify
and his team band only a vancing more than two areas that could support
Justin Nobel is writing a book cataloguing environ- small subset of individuals dozen restoration projects new, engineered habitat.
mental issues across the country. He wrote “Knee-Deep,” in each colony in order to through Restore the Missis- Birds that benefit: Ameri-
about rising seas along Florida’s coast in the September- minimize disturbance to sippi River Delta, a coalition can Oystercatcher, Brown
October 2014 issue of Audubon. nesting birds. of conservation groups. Pelican, Reddish Egret

OPPOSITE: ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID ALLEN SIBLEY. THIS PAGE: PHOTO BY MIKE FERNANDEZ/AUDUBON FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 37
POLLUTION

SGD
KNRS
38
AHQCR
AUDUBON | FALL 2017
A BIOLOGIST TRACED
MERCURY FROM
AN INDUSTRIAL
SOURCE TO POISONED
SONGBIRDS AND
DEVISED A NEW WAY
TO HOLD POLLUTERS
FINANCIALLY
ACCOUNTABLE.

BY PAUL GREENBERG

PHOTOGRAPHY BY
GREG KAHN

g
MERCURY MYSTERY
Dan Cristol showed how mercury
(above) from a contaminated
river spread to songbirds living
far from its banks.

FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 39

I
t was just another sweltering summer afternoon
gathering blood samples from Shenandoah Valley birds
when the news came in. The ornithologist Dan Cristol had
been conducting a preliminary assessment funded by Du-
Pont to determine to what degree the company’s pollution of
the watershed might have affected the local birds. DuPont was
facing potential legal action and had cautiously agreed to one
summer of funding for a small team to gauge just how expensive
fixing the damages might be. True to his nature, Cristol had not
been tentative in his research. He and his students had skulked
into stream-bank kingfisher nests, cornered screech-owls near
bridges, and mist-netted dozens of species of songbirds. Using
tiny needles, they’d extracted drops of bird blood before gently
releasing their subjects back into the wild. Then they’d shipped
their samples to a toxicology lab at Texas A&M, and watched as
their funding dribbled away at a rate of $55 a pop.
Now as the sun blazed over the South River, a major tribu-
tary of the mighty Shenandoah, and waves of heat rose up from
the newly mown hayfields, Cristol opened an email from the lab
and read the first test results.
“Holy fucking shit!” one of the students cried out.
“I rechecked the numbers about five times to make sure,”
Cristol recalls. “We were being funded by the responsible party,
so I figured DuPont would look at what we’d found and say, ‘OK,
thanks but no thanks, we’ve seen enough.’ I was worried that after
this tantalizing glimpse we would not get to learn what was really
going on. But to their credit, everyone just kept moving forward
and letting us propose to answer each new question that arose.”
Cristol and his students had
discovered that the DuPont
mercury spill had penetrated
much further into the avian food
web than anyone had previously
expected. Not only was mercury
found in fish-eating raptors like
osprey and eagles, but it was
present in bluebirds that flitted
far away from the contaminated
South River; it was in surpris-
ingly high levels in the feathers
of the distinctly non-riverine
Red-eyed Vireo whose song tells
you to look-up way-up tree-top to
find it; it was in scrappy Carolina Wrens, whirling Tree Swallows,
and reclusive thrushes. Even in the diminutive Blue-gray Gnat-
catcher that weighs in at a minuscule third of an ounce.
Most consequently, the work had laid the foundation for a
novel way to restore North American songbird populations that
are declining throughout the country. For Cristol’s research has
ultimately perfected a way of holding major polluters accountable
for something as profound as it has long been intangible: a means
to calculate and seek reparations for bird years lost.
Y
ou couldn’t have a better site to test the
effects of methylmercury,” Cristol tells me as we stand
on a bridge over the South River in Waynesboro,
Virginia, and stare southeast at a 177-acre chemical
plant. For roughly 50 years this gray smudge of a
facility, built into the green hillsides by DuPont in 1928, manu-
factured something called acetate fibers—and used mercury as
a catalyst for the first 20 years of its operation.
DuPont has never strongly contested that it put significant
amounts of mercury into the South River. Ever since mercury
was detected in river sediment and floodplain soil around the
40 AUDUBON | FALL 2017
Waynesboro plant in the 1970s, the corporation has been trying
to figure out how to put its pollution legacy behind it. For years
DuPont funded a vaguely missioned “South River Science Team”
where state officials and academics monitored mercury levels
in fish, with the hope that concentrations would eventually go
down. No such decrease was observed. Sampling continued to
show levels in some fish higher than four parts per million—nearly
four times that found in swordfish, which the FDA urges consumers
to avoid because of high mercury levels. Nevertheless, officials
representing the State of Virginia (technically the key plaintiff in
these early proceedings) seemed at a loss as to what to do next.
In the early 2000s the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense
Council filed an intention to sue DuPont to move the issue forward
from monitoring to mitigation. “[DuPont’s] remedy was to have a
hundred-year monitoring program,” says NRDC senior attorney
Nancy Marks. “But we knew the mercury in the river was sky high.
And DuPont was the only obvious source.” Unlike other American
watersheds that have been host to numerous polluters, the DuPont
plant is the only mercury-discharging industry the South River
basin ever had. So the bulk of the toxin in the ecosystem and any
harm it may have caused birds is undeniably DuPont’s fault.
“For us it was a no-brainer,” Marks recalls. “It was a very strong
case.” The case was made even stronger by the fact that NRDC
had just won a big legal victory in a mercury pollution suit in Maine
under the same legal theory. The Maine suit had gone to trial, and
the polluters, a company called Mallinckrodt, Inc., if ordered by the
court to pay for remediation, will likely owe hundreds of millions of
dollars (this in addition to many millions of dollars spent on legal
g G AT H E RI N G E VI D E N C E
Above, left to right: A blood sample from a wild Tree Swallow; arachnids,
such as this wolf spider, are the primary source of mercury for songbirds;
a male captive Zebra Finch. Opposite: As the control group in Cristol’s
lab research, these Zebra Finches weren’t dosed with mercury.
fees). While DuPont declined to comment about that lawsuit, it
seems likely that the prospect of a Maine-sized case going to trial
gave corporate officers pause. Soon after the NRDC action, the
company entered into a consent decree with the river’s trustees, the
State of Virginia, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
But by trying to reach a settlement over the South River, Du-
Pont started unraveling another knot when it agreed to finance the
research that would determine the value of its liability. That’s where
Cristol entered the picture. If the company was really ready to pay
to restore the birds of the South River drainage, how would that
cost be calculated? It was obvious that immediate and quantifi-
able harm had been done to, say, sport fish and the people who
had lost the opportunity to catch and eat them. But when the bird
blood results revealed methylmercury present throughout the avian
community, even in songbirds that lived far from the river, Cristol
realized they had a chance to build a much more expansive case.
First they had to figure out how birds that had nothing to do
with the river were getting so much mercury into their systems.
T
here’s nothing like getting paid to get up early
and catch birds on a beautiful spring morning,” Cristol
tells me as we cruise down Route 340 to check in at 10 of
the 50 sampling sites he established during the seven years
of his mercury field study. “But by 11 o’clock at night,
when you’re going out to catch screech-owls with your students,
hoping local drug dealers aren’t hanging out under the bridge, you’re
saying, ‘This is beyond tedious. This is horrible.’ ” The Salvadoran
street gang MS-13 is active in the valley, and several murders have
occurred in the area, including at least one along the river’s banks.
Nevertheless Cristol set about designing and implementing a
largely undergraduate-staffed research regimen along the length of
the South River. “We knew the mercury must be coming through
what the birds ate. And the only way we could figure out exactly
what they were eating was to catch them in the act.” Realizing the
futility of trying to reliably document adults foraging, Cristol set-
tled on the next best thing: measuring what adults fed their babies.
Using a method perfected by ecologists in the 1990s, Cristol
and his students sneaked into nest boxes while adults were hunt-
ing and put tiny plastic zip ties or “ligatures” around the nestlings’
necks. “We had to be really careful,” Cristol recalls. “Too tight
and the babies would suffocate. Too loose and the food goes down
and you lose your sample. Just right and you get the perfect bug
to measure.” It’s a testament to Cristol’s care that not a single bird
was harmed by ligature amid hundreds of sample collections over
several years. There were all sorts of things in those bird craws.
Grasshoppers and grubs. Gnats and houseflies. But there was one
unexpected prey item that was causing most of the problems.
“Thirty percent of their diet was big spiders,” Cristol says.
“And those spiders were bringing in 70 percent of their mercury.”
Spiders are alpha predators of the insect world. They eat big bugs
that have in turn eaten smaller bugs, which had rooted in the mer-
cury-laden river sediment. Just as swordfish and sharks end up as
storehouses for all the mercury
MERCURY WAS IN their prey contains, as well as
all the mercury their prey con-
SCRAPPY CAROLINA tained, so too do spiders end up
WRENS, WHIRLING “biomagnifying” mercury in the
TREE SWALLOWS, AND environment and concentrating
it in their flesh. And they were
RECLUSIVE THRUSHES. then dumping this immense
toxic load onto songbirds.
It was a revolutionary discovery. “It was just a one-pager in
Science, but it was a game changer. [Dan] moved the needle on
[understanding] how mercury behaves in the environment,”
U.S. FWS’s John Schmerfeld tells me. Henceforth, when mer-
cury contamination cases are considered (and dozens are pend-
ing), litigators will be more likely to look beyond the immedi-
ate pollution site and consider wildlife populations in the wider
surrounding environment. It’s a difference that could change
the nature of settlements in mercury cases around the country.
Now that they knew how waterborne mercury was making its
way into terrestrial bird blood, the next step was to establish just
how many birds mercury had harmed and how badly. This num-
ber—the dollar amount needed to restore bird numbers to their
pre-DuPont levels—would inform the price tag of the settle-
ment. Again, a disciplined, time-consuming regime was required,
as was some pretty heated negotiation for access to private land.
“People we asked for access came in two flavors,” Cristol remem-
bers. “One worried we might be jackbooted government thugs
coming to take away their property rights. The other thought
we were working for DuPont and trying to poison them.” They
needed permission to put up row after row of birdhouses along
FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 41
the polluted river, as well as in nearby uncontaminated tributar-
ies, in order to establish reference populations of Tree Swallows.
By comparing swallows in mercury-contaminated stretches and
unaffected areas, Cristol and his students showed that reproduction
was indeed being affected. Overall they found a 20 percent decline
in offspring in high-mercury areas. In more sensitive species, like
Carolina Wrens, as mercury levels increased to three parts per mil-
lion, the birds were more likely to abandon their nests altogether.
The team also discovered how wide a swath methylmercury
had cut through the South River drainage. “With river contam-
ination, length is easy,” says Cristol. “Width is more difficult.”
That mercury was in the river sediment was obvious. But because
they had proof of terrestrial insects with high mercury levels, they
could begin to fan out into the floodplain to look for effect. Mercu-
ry becomes methylated (and thus can permeate cell membranes) by
interaction with anaerobic bacteria in areas that are frequently wet.
The flat fields along the river that flooded regularly turned out to
be methylation factories. In many cases mercury concentrations in
the birds and bugs were found to be worse many miles downstream
than right next door to the polluting facility. In the end, with his
nest boxes and insect collections, Cristol determined that mercury
had affected more than 11,000 acres, far more land than previously
thought. Two more years and 900 bird surveys later, he knew
the densities of every songbird species in the Shenandoah Valley.
With those data in hand, parties to the DuPont settlement
could then plug numbers—including bird density and range, con-
tamination levels, and reproductive success—into a model devel-
oped in the 2000s. The original model evaluated the damage a
barge company had inflicted on a coral reef in Florida, but its basic
math can be applied to a range of different damaging agents and
ecosystems. “Once you have an idea of what the injury is, you can
put that into the model, and then on the back end, eventually the
theoretical equivalent in money is coughed out,” says Schmerfeld.
But one more piece of the puzzle had to be solved for the data
42 AUDUBON | FALL 2017
g G RO UN D Z E RO
Dan Cristol searches for birds along the South River. Cristol showed that
mercury that leaked from the DuPont factory, whose stacks tower over
the vegetation, into the waterway eventually made its way into song-
birds and a variety of other organisms in the area.
to stand up in court. Correlation is not causation, as is so frequently
said in scientific circles. To establish causation, a different kind of
experiment had to be initiated. An experiment that, for a passion-
ate bird lover like Cristol, would prove to be the most painful of all.
T
he epidemiology around methylmercury is still
evolving, but the pollutant, at the concentrations found
in the contaminated stretches of the South River, has
the diabolical tendency to profoundly interfere with
life’s processes rather than kill outright. Unlike most
toxins, it can pass the blood-brain barrier, and its tendency to
bind to sulfur-containing proteins that are central to the nervous
and metabolic systems can cause multiple malfunctions. Birds can
lose efficiency in capturing prey, as well as something behavioral
scientists called “nesting tenacity.” It can alter immune response,
spur autoimmune disorder, change expression of reproductive
hormones, and limit an animal’s ability to respond to stress.
While the health effects of mercury poisoning on vertebrates
are clear, it’s extremely difficult to pin the loss of birds on a single
pollution event. Mercury was probably causing nesting failures
in Cristol’s field research subjects, but other confounding factors
such as an uptick in invasive predators or some other unknown
pollutant could also have played a role. To strengthen the case
for actual causation, Cristol had to subject captive animals to the
isolated and punishing effects of a high-mercury diet.
“I could not ethically justify it,” he tells me as he opens the
door to a repurposed cattle barn on the William and Mary
campus, “if I didn’t think that their imprisonment in cages was
going to save a lot of birds in the wild.”
Inside the lab hundreds of Zebra Finches peep and flutter
and peck at piles of rainbow-colored birdseed that lab techs have
taken to calling “fruity pebbles.” A black or orange mark on a
birdcage label indicates whether the subjects inside are controls
eating clean fruity pebbles, or experimentals given food dosed
to the same methylmercury concentration as a swordfish steak.
Cristol and his students pursued the research for six years with
an equal amount of rigor as their field studies. They repeated
the nesting trials they’d done along the South River. They tested
finches’ memories by hiding food in one of 10 feeders and then
studying the birds’ efficiency at re-finding the food an hour later.
They probed stress-regulation abilities as indicated by the levels
of the hormone corticosterone. They even examined songs and
compared them with the lower-pitched song distortions they’d
observed in the field. In truth they tested so many different vec-
tors, including heredity and song learning across multiple gen-
erations, that it’s beyond the scope of this article to list them all.
The meticulous approach comes back to Cristol’s central
passion: to preserve the lives of birds. “This is the weight of evi-
dence,” he tells me, closing the door to the chirping and peeping
in the lab. “After all the tearing apart the lawyers will do, a judge
will say it’s clear there has been a strong effect. Birds were lost
year after year.”
The lab experiments bore out what Cristol was witnessing in
the wild: Methylmercury was seriously messing with birds’ minds,
particularly their spatial memory. Wild birds need all their faculties
to navigate thousands of miles from Virginia to South America.
The lab and field studies were eventually assembled into
a compelling dossier. DuPont, having paid for all the research
and watched as increasingly damning evidence accumulated, has
come rather peacefully to the table. In late July a federal judge ap-
proved the settlement. “DuPont will move forward with its com-
mitment to provide $42.3 million in support of restoration proj-
ects in the South River and South Fork Shenandoah watersheds,”
says Mike Liberati, South River project director for the DuPont
Corporate Remediation Group. “We are committed to working
with all Waynesboro-area stakeholders on these projects.”
Some $2.5 million is designated for avian conservation, and a
further $19.5 million will fund “land protection, property acqui-
sition, and recreational and wildlife enhancements”—all of which
could directly benefit songbirds. “We really use birds to represent
the whole terrestrial injury,” says Anne Condon, a former student of
Cristol’s who oversaw U.S. FWS’s natural resource damage case. “I
don’t know what we would have done if we hadn’t had Dan’s data.”
I
t seems fitting that the settlement concluded just
as Cristol began a sabbatical year. While he’s deeply involved
with the lives of his students and he incorporated under-
graduates into nearly every phase of the mercury research,
it’s birds he loves most. His teenage daughters Indigo and
Lazuli are named for two bunting species, and the first trip of
his sabbatical year was to North Dakota to help his equally
bird-obsessed father bag a Baird’s Sparrow or a Sprague’s Pipit
to add to the paterfamilias’s life list. Cristol seems practically
skipping with the joy of impending freedom as we do some
casual birding around a forested swath of campus a few days
after graduation. “This is the only week of the year,” he tells
me, smiling as he peers through his binoculars, “that there are
more Blackpoll Warblers on campus than students.”
While Cristol heads off on sabbatical, a more difficult phase
is ramping up. “Now the work begins,” Schmerfeld says. “We
worked how many years to reach a settlement? Now people
need to put the money on the ground in smart ways. That’s
always tough. When there’s a big check written, public interest
is heightened.” Indeed, how money will be spent on the ground
will probably be the most contentious phase of restoring lost
bird years—in large part because it’s not feasible to remove mer-
cury from all 11,000 acres affected by the Waynesboro plant.
True, mercury-laden riverbanks can be stabilized. But to get rid
of mercury altogether, vast amounts of soil would have to be
removed and stored in a toxic waste facility. Side settlements
would have to be reached with scores of landowners along more
than 100 miles of river. All parties to the settlement realize that
new bird years must be created outside of the contaminated
portion of the South River to make up for the bird years lost.
Because the federal government manages migratory birds,
which includes almost all songbirds, the $2.5 million earmarked
for avian conservation could be spent to protect habitat anywhere
along their migratory pathways. Buying land outside the country
might be the most cost-effective approach. “We started finding
out early on that you can restore habitat in the Shenandoah all
you want,” says Schmerfeld, “but it might not move the needle as
much as protecting overwintering habitat.” Cristol agrees. “For
the same dollars, you could get 10 times the number of bird years
in Belize than here. It’s the
MANY OTHER same birds you’re protecting,
BIRDS MAY HAVE just in their winter habitat.”
That habitat acquisition
BEEN SO SEVERELY and all other restoration will
POISONED THAT begin just as Cristol starts to
contemplate bigger sabbatical-
THEY DIDN’T HAVE sized questions. Most troubling
THE WHEREWITHAL of all is whether he correctly
TO PICK UP A TWIG. calculated the totality of the
harm to birds. In the back-
ground lurks the possibility that what he measured was just a
faint echo of the actual damage. Many other birds may have
been so severely poisoned that they didn’t have the wherewithal
to pick up a twig, let alone compete with others to build a nest in
a test birdhouse. They never would’ve detected those lost birds.
“How many birds died that we never saw?” Cristol now wonders.
“Twenty percent is the number we’re saying were lost each time
they nested. But then I’m like, ‘This whole thing is playing into
the hands of industry.’ We’re not even considering all those many
other birds that weren’t around anymore to be studied.”
To anyone outside of academic science, the South River
mercury work would appear to be exactly the kind of patient
evidence-building the world needs in this era of fake news and
alternative facts—not to mention an approach that may be even
more important moving forward, if the Trump administration’s
efforts to roll back mercury air pollution standards are successful.
Nature, it would seem, has no better defense than good research.
But for Cristol, a man who has organized his life around wild
birds, the pace of science now feels painfully slow. Not a year goes
by when he doesn’t note the disappearance of a warbler from his
home woods or the waning of swallows on the wing crossing his
local meadows.
“When I first started out, I thought I should add to the body of
knowledge. I thought I should be a scientist.” Today he shakes his
head and considers all the bird years lost around the world while he
diligently hoed his narrow row. “Now that way of thinking seems
like a luxury. Now it seems selfish to just be a scientist. In the end,”
he tells me as we bid goodbye, “I should have been an activist.” A
Paul Greenberg is the author of American Catch. His last Audubon
story explored bonding with his mother over birding.
FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 43
 FIELD
GUIDE
BIRDING No one is too young to get hooked on birds.

4
Tips for
Teachers
GE AR
THE
U LT I MAT E
K I DS’ K I T

Turn your young

birder loose
with Eagle
Find a Hotspot Optics Kingbird
Stick to areas binoculars ($100;
near water. You’ll 8.5x32), which
likely spot swans, are compact,
herons, and lightweight, and
egrets, which stay high in quality;
still and are easier Celestron’s
for kids to see. Nature DX bins
Plus, ducklings! ($120; 8x32) are
a solid choice for
Look for Clues older kids—the
If you can’t find glass is excep-
birds on your how many north american avians can you identify? thirty? tionally good for
outing, don’t One hundred? Four hundred? What if you had started birding when the price, making
despair. Point them useful
out signs of their you were seven? Kids have an incredible capacity to stow away infor- into adulthood.
presence such mation, see subtle details, investigate new curiosities, and use their Don’t plop a hefty
as nests, cracked Peterson guide
seeds, whitewash imaginations—their brains are basically little powerhouses. Plus, into small hands:
(poop), or owl encouraging a love of birds could inspire young environmentalists The National
pellets. Geographic Kids
and scientists. Nurture your own birder with advice from Audubon Bird Guide ($16) is
Get Tech-y experts, parents, and even kids themselves. ideal up to around
Kids may have age 10, while The
trouble looking Young Birder’s
through spotting Start at the Library Guide ($16), which
scopes. Just pop There’s a huge selection of kids’ bird books contains more
an adapter over at our local library, and we’ve borrowed species, should
the scope’s ocular them all. My five-year-old son takes great appease kids
lens and line it up pride in sharing the new bits he’s learned. into their tweens.
with your smart- REI’s Tarn 18 Pack
phone camera so Embrace the Neighbors ($40; ages 8-12)
they can view the While they’re often ignored by adults, has room for all
bird on a screen. everyday species can be magic for children. of this gear, lunch,
Watching a sparrow give itself a dust bath and more; our
is a joy that, to my kids, is as thrilling as any
FROM TOP: CAMILLA CEREA/AUDUBON (2); COURTESY OF REI

Bring in Experts 11-year-old tester

Many avian rare-bird sighting. praised its nu-
HO ME LIF E
organizations merous pockets
prepare lessons Set Up a Feeder and comfortable
and activities Feed a Child’s No yard? No problem. Anyone can hang design.
for classroom
use. Audubon
Urge to Bird a bird feeder on the fire escape or a tree. I
even use my windows and stoop.
—Alisa Opar

Adventures and in my nine years as a parent, I’ve come

BirdSleuth are away with a universal observation: Children Foster Creativity
two examples to like to collect things, especially facts. Birds My kindergartner is practically willing
look for online. can be a way to channel that obsession. himself to write just so he can fill out his
—Marina Pita, Here are four inexpensive approaches I’ve bird log. He spends hours copying pictures
Seward Park adopted while raising two little avian lovers of avians, so I found several drawing books
Audubon Center in Brooklyn, New York. to encourage him. —Linda McCarthy

44 AUDUBON | FALL 2017

 Find more kid-
Ages when famous Jane Alexander friendly fun at
birders first picked Roger Tory Peterson
11 10 audubon.org /
up their bins 8 6 Kenn Kaufman
Sálim Moizuddin Abdul Ali birding.

TH E BIR DIST

Game On
Any activity can sound more enticing when you turn it into a game.
Remember how Pokémon Go inspired millions of smartphone users to head outdoors?
Here are three ways to put the “fun” back in “fundamentals of birding.”
3
Ways to
Get Stoked
Celebrate
Urban Birds
This fun and
interactive project
from the Cornell
Lab of Ornithology
aims to reach
diverse birders
from preschool
Scavenger Hunt Sound Off Binocular Spy age on up. It offers
To fire up kids’ powers of observation, Most children know what a pig and dog Teach proper bins usage by asking kids to species-ID tools
make a list of target birds before sound like—but what about a Red-eyed read signs at varying distances. Start with and supports local
heading to the yard or park. Use general Vireo? Ask kids to imitate the bird the closest and move farther away until art, gardening, and
categories like ducks and hawks or even sounds they hear, then use a field-guide they’re okay holding the barrels steady science events.
critters in groups of threes or fours. You app to pull up the IDs and play back and turning the focus wheel. Once those
could also make a rainbow by finding clips. The key is to let them voice their basics are down, play I Spy to have them Young Birders
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: CAMILLA CEREA/AUDUBON; DAVID MORGAN/AUDUBON PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS ; ISTOCK; SEAN FITZGERALD; KIM KAUFMAN

feathered subjects that cover ROYGBIV. own translation of the songs and calls. re-find smaller objects. —Nicholas Lund Clubs
Founded in Ohio,
these groups,
DI A RY
wanted to learn all about the feathered creatures that lived usually for birders
around my home in Toledo, Ohio. After my grandfather between the ages
A Day in the Life took me to nearby Magee Marsh, there was no going back. of 8 and 19, are
of a Teen Birder Adults, whether they’re strangers or mentors or my
parents, have helped shape my role as a birder. My good
now spreading
across the nation.
“you’re a birdwatcher? But you play hockey!” It’s not friend Tim Haney, for instance, has guided me through If there isn’t one in
uncommon for me to hear some variation of this from exciting experiences in the field, while Kenn and Kimberly your community,
new friends. Yes, it’s unorthodox for a 17-year-old (that’s Kaufman have taught me to be a leader to other young talk to your teen
me pictured below) to be captain of the hockey team and birders. This kind of support from grown-ups is crucial. about starting one
also a bird guide. But this is who I am, and I love it. To kids my age who are still getting to know the through school,
My passion for birds sprouted when I was six years old. world of birding: Don’t let other people’s opinions get 4-H, or your local
I was struck by the Northern Cardinal’s vibrant red and to you! Make sure to ask questions of those more experi- Audubon chapter.
enced, and give answers to those who aren’t fully fledged.
And if you’re always on your phone, you’ve got a great Citizen Science
head start. Social media is an excellent tool for finding Community bird-
and sharing sightings, photos, or opinions so that you ing ventures can
never feel isolated. I love using Facebook and Twitter fuel inquisitive
to tell my stories, and Instagram and Snapchat to drop young minds.
highlights from the field. Options include
Now that I’m older, practice and homework leave me the Big Sit! in
little to no free time to study birds. But in the end, the October, Project
hockey season gives me more than it takes away. Traveling FeederWatch in
to tournaments allows me to observe species I wouldn’t winter, and the
find in Ohio, and meet new people who share my interest. Great Backyard
Yup, I’m the type of kid who helps pump up his team Bird Count in
for a big game and admires the song of the Wood Thrush February. —Jason
on a spring morning—a captain who leads on the ice and “The Birdnerd”
in the field. Young birders around the world will have St. Sauver, Spring
different experiences, but we all have the same calling. Creek Prairie
I can’t wait to hear your story someday. —Nate Koszycki Audubon Center

FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 45

 FIELD
GUIDE
TRAVEL Take your birding adventures to new heights.

GE AR
E Y E S I N TH E
SKIES

When you’re on
the move, you
don’t want to get
bogged down by
heavy binoculars.
The new Nikon
Monarch HG
8x42s ($980)
weigh in at 23.5
ounces—on par
with the rest
of the popular
Monarch line, and
lighter than other
best-sellers in
their price class.
The bins, which
have fog-proof and
scratch-resistant
lenses, maximize
contrast and

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SAMUEL MELIM/CRISTALINO LODGE; COURTESY NIKON; MICHAEL LUNDGREN; DAVID ALLEN SIBLEY
brightness through
most birds live three-dimensional lives, exploring every level phase-corrected,
from the substrate to the sky. Do all of your birdwatching from the high-reflective,
and dielectric
ground, and you miss out on part of the experience. By taking our
coatings. And with
birding up a notch, we gain new perspectives, see birds from new an angular view of
angles, and possibly spot new species. Just as importantly, shifting 60.3 degrees, they
Grail Bird scan a sprawling
Golden Eagle
your altitude may help deepen your understanding of how the birds canopy with ease.
These large themselves experience their world. —Kenn Kaufman —Purbita Saha
raptors are usually
solitary, but during
HIGH A DV EN TUR E
migration they
concentrate along
ridges, where up- Nest Quest
drafts allow easy
gliding. The best black swifts nest behind waterfalls and can fly so
site for Goldens high they’re invisible to the human eye. To better under-
in the Lower 48 stand the elusive birds and how climate change might af-
is atop Mon- fect the remote, wet rock faces where they breed, this year
tana’s 8,520-foot- Audubon Montana organized 25 birders and scientists to
high Bridger go in search of nests. Scaling slippery bluffs beside roaring
Mountains, where waterfalls, the volunteers discovered six new sites in Glacier
more than 200 National Park and three elsewhere, bringing the total tally
may pass the of known sites in the state to nearly two dozen. Intrepid
hawkwatch on a birders interested in taking part in the project next year can
mid-October day. visit mtaudubon.org for more information. —Rashmi Shivni

46 AUDUBON | FALL 2017

 37,000 ft Rüppell’s Griffon Vulture
For more fall
The world’s 29,000 ft Bar-headed Goose
destinations, visit
highest-flying 27,000 ft Alpine Chough
audubon.org /
bird species 26,900 ft Whooper Swan
travel.
26,250 ft Tawny Eagle

4
UNI TED STATES

Take It Up a Notch
Zip Line
Intrepid birders will get a rush zip-lining across the landscape—and enjoy stopping to Tips for
ID birds in the canopy at mid-course platforms. Several companies cater to bird lovers, Lofty
including Crater Lake Zipline (Klamath Falls, OR), Ziplines at Pacific Crest (Wrightwood,
CA), and Adventures on the Gorge (Lansing, WV).
Birding
Safety First
Lookout Tower High-level birding
Hauling yourself up dozens of stairs is well worth the effort for breathtaking views of a range needn’t be high-
of bird habitats, from forests to shorelines to marshes. Check out the excellent vistas from risk. Follow safety
lookout towers at South Padre Island Birding and Nature Center (South Padre Island, TX), guidelines and
Perry Lakes Birding Tower (Perry Lakes Park, AL), and Big Lagoon State Park (Pensacola, FL). wear protective
gear such as
Hot Air Balloon helmets if you’re
For a truly unique experience, book a hot air balloon tour and hover at the height that going for edgier
many birds fly. Between May and October, Westwind Balloon Company offers flights pursuits.
over Michigan for birdwatchers who want a rare perspective on Great Blue Herons,
Sandhill Cranes, and more. Dress for
FROM TOP: JON VICKERS/ADVENTURES ON THE GORGE; COLIN D. YOUNG/SHUTTERSTOCK; JOHN HOGLEN/ABOVEMICHIGAN.COM; ISTOCK; MATTHEW WILLIAMS-ELLIS

Success
Skyscraper Consider the
Viewing platforms at the top of tall buildings can be a great place to catch migrating possibility that
birds at dusk. In fall and spring step out on the 86th floor of New York City’s Empire State conditions may
Building, which dims its lights to prevent collisions, for an eye-level view of warblers, be different up
vireos, and more nighttime travelers. Visit Audubon’s Lights Out program to find other there—sunnier
high-rises that go dark for birds: audubon.org/lights-out. —Meghan Bartels or windier, for ex-
ample—and dress
appropriately.
T ROPICS
Study Up
Head For the Depending on
locality, you may
Treetops see different
birds up high.
tropical forests provide a rich Look for local
variety of niches for bird life, from information on
the ground to mid-levels to the treetop or high-
highest branches. For earthbound elevation species
birders, though, treetop specialists and study their
can be hard to spot. Fortunately, at field marks so
some South American destinations, you’ll be ready to
the intrepid can rise to the level of recognize them.
their highest-dwelling quarry.
Canopy towers enable visitors Carry On
to climb through the tropical forest. the Cristalino Lodge (opposite, vated platforms. These bridges allow If you’re taking
Viewing platforms 100 feet or top) offers two of the finest tow- visitors to stroll through the treetops binoculars and
more above the ground allow eye- ers. Stretching 165 feet high with and seek out the best vantage points. cameras, think
level studies of treetop birds—plus viewing platforms at multiple lev- One spectacular example is near Iq- about how you’ll
a chance to see raptors, parrots, els, they provide a complete cross- uitos in northeastern Peru, accessed carry them and
and other birds flying over the section and a view over the top of via the Explorama or ExplorNapo make sure the
canopy. Eastern Ecuador has some the canopy. Both Harpy Eagle and lodges. Another is at Sacha Lodge straps are in good
of the best structures, such as the Crested Eagle have been spotted (above) in eastern Ecuador. shape. You’ll
tower at the Napo Wildlife Cen- from the upper levels. Whether tower or walkway, want your hands
ter. On the southern edge of the Some sites also have canopy make the climb and you’ll find spec- free for safety
Amazon Basin in central Brazil, walkways that extend between ele- tacular upper-story birding. —K.K. while climbing.

FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 47

 FIELD
GUIDE
PHOTOGRAPHY ’Tis the season to get
your ducks in a row.

P H OTO O P

Sitting Ducks
virtually every place in north
America hosts ducks at some
point during the year, and many
year-round. Here are several where
you’re guaranteed to get great shots.

Phoenix Metro Area, Arizona

perhaps they slipped right by you unnoticed when you had As many as 20 different duck
your lens pointed upward; maybe they fail to catch your attention species have been photographed
in the parks and waterways of the
precisely because you see them everywhere. Ducks, however, sport Phoenix area. One of the hotspots
some of the most striking and intricate plumage in nature and so are is Papago Park, adjacent to the
Phoenix Zoo, where you’ll find
well worth training your camera on. And although they’re wary in the American Wigeon, Ring-necked
wilderness, when they migrate to urban waters, they may become very Ducks, and Northern Pintail.
approachable. Ducks also become quite social in the fall, gathering Northwest Coastal Borderlands,
in large groups like the Mallards above, so head out and join the flock. Washington
A spit of land running out to the
Semiahmoo resort, in the commu-
nity of Blaine, is a highly produc-
tive area for all of North America’s
scoter species. The area is also

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NIKHIL BAHL; E.J. PEIKER; BRIAN ZWIEBEL; DAVID ALLEN SIBLEY.
excellent for Harlequin Duck,
Grail Bird Common Goldeneye, Barrow’s
Wood Duck Goldeneye, and Greater Scaup.
These incredibly
photogenic ducks Ritch Grissom Memorial
gather during the Wetlands, Florida
autumn on shady, The series of lakes that make up the
tree-lined ponds Ritch Grissom Memorial Wetlands
and rivers. Go in Viera provides easy access to
out in early fall to species like Mottled Duck, Hooded
AIM H IG H
scope out prime Merganser, and Blue-winged Teal.
locations and How to Freeze Birds in Flight For action shots, remember that ducks will almost
plan your shoot- always take off and land into the wind. The extra lift of a head wind makes landings North Chagrin Reservation, Ohio
ing angles, so more controlled and provides additional lift for takeoff. Shoot in manual-exposure The Cleveland area boasts one of
you’ll be prepared mode, as it is next to impossible to adjust the exposure-compensation dial and the best places in the entire coun-
to go back when accurately track a duck in flight. Set your shutter speed to 1/2000 second or faster, try to photograph Wood Ducks.
local trees are at your aperture to f/5.6 or f/8, and adjust your ISO accordingly. Use continuous or The species breeds at the North
the peak of fall servo auto-focus mode and keep the focus points directly on the head of the duck. Chagrin Reservation, located just
colors. —Brian Zwiebel east of the city. —E.J. Peiker

48 AUDUBON | FALL 2017

 For more duck
North American Duck 0.6
1.1 hotspots and
Populations (In Millions): 4.2 4.4
0.7 0.7 2.6 other tips, go to
2017 vs. long-term averages 2.0 audubon.org /
(1955-2016) GADWALL CANVASBACK REDHEAD NORTHERN SHOVELER photography.

3
CO URTSH IP

Romancing the Water

Ducks display a variety of courtship behaviors, beginning as early as fall migration.
Strategies Have your camera ready so you can capture their ardor in unique and colorful images.
GE AR
for Flocks
Go Mobile
Look for If you want
Reflections photos of ducks
Frozen ponds in flight, you need
with some open the wind at your
water provide a back. Want to
great opportu- find hens with
nity for capturing Neck Stretch Allopreening Back Bend broods? That
reflections. Look The drakes of Common Golden- Drakes and hens will often preen Redhead drakes perform an means sneaking
for ducks on the eye stretch their neck forward each other during the breeding amazing ritual: They will raise through shallow
edge of the ice or to get a hen’s attention. If this season to maintain a strong con- their crown, then bend their neck water. Ducks
in pools on top of does not work, a drake will snap nection. Early-morning light really until the back of their head is feeding on wild
it. Focus on those his head back and splash water brings out the color of preening resting on their back. Photograph- rice? You’re going
closest to you and behind him to hammer the Wood Ducks in particular. ing this behavior at a slightly to have to walk
wait for at least message home. Meter on the Shoot at a high frame rate to higher angle will allow you to get or paddle to a
one of them to goldeneye to preset your expo- ensure you get eye contact with a clear view of the drake’s eye. lee shoreline.
make eye contact. sure before the behavior starts. the drake and the hen. —Dan Walters The point is, you
need to be able
Find the Anomaly to move. Cabela’s
PRO F ILE
It is not uncom- Breathable Hunt-
mon for different
species of ducks
Swamp Steward ing Waders 
($220) will keep
to winter together, each summer, tara tanaka waits for Hooded Merganser and Black-bellied Whistling-Duck two-thirds of your
creating a great fledglings to take their first flight—although “flight” is a generous term for the act of plunging body dry as you
juxtaposition. haphazardly out of cavity nests to splash in the water or land on the leaf-laden ground below. navigate marsh by
Focus on the She can film them in her own backyard, a 45-acre cypress swamp in Florida’s panhandle that foot. To transport
bird that is the she owns with her husband, a retired state park naturalist. The property, which they purchased gear, stow it in
anomaly and and protected with a conservation easement, inspired Tanaka to pick up a camera, and it has the Shappell Jet
provide enough become the backdrop for most of her photography and videography. Tanaka and her husband Sled ($60) or the
depth of field to manage the land as a wildlife refuge, and she hopes others will follow their lead. The result many pockets of
let the surround- of their work on behalf of the swamp’s residents is a rich collection of life for Tanaka to film. the Drake Blind
ing species be “There’s always, always something to photograph or video here,” she says. —Meghan Bartels Bag 2.0 (above;
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DAN WALTERS (3); COURTESY DRAKE; TARA TANAKA (3)

identifiable. $70). When you

need to cross
Prepare for Flight open water to
Whenever you get to where the
photograph ducks are, a canoe
flocks, be ready with a wide, sta-
for action. If one ble design, such
bird gets spooked, as the Wenonah
often they will all Fusion (from
take off. Toward $2,049), is the
the end of a day, answer. Then pull
flocks also tend to Hunters Special-
fly to where they ties Camo Leaf
will roost. Position Blind Material 
yourself where ($20) over you
the light will be for an extremely
most interesting. lightweight blind.
—Nikhil Bahl —Michael Furtman

FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 49

SPARROW Continued from page 25
from day one to day four turns out to be
37.68°C. Point-oh-three degrees Celsius:
That’s the tiny gradation that makes all
the difference.
Of course, what you get when you
hatch a day-one egg is a day-one chick—a
chick that must be hand-fed by humans
straight out of the egg, a special formula
the consistency of thick pancake batter
administered every half-hour, syringe into
gaping beak. This isn’t the first time Rare
Species has dealt with day-one chicks,
and unfortunately they’ve found them to
be almost as challenging as day-one eggs.
Last year when May flooding threatened
for the second time to drown every clutch
on the prairie, the field techs conducted an
emergency egg harvest, rushing more than
three dozen of them to Reillo’s safe har-
bor. After candling them, he determined
that 23 were still viable (the fact that he
could tell the state of their embryos meant
they’d been in the nest for at least three
days). Those went into the incubator, and
all but two successfully hatched.
“That just began the difficulty, of
course,” Reillo says. The diet that works
so well in chicks that are just a few days
older seemed to go right through these
hatchlings. Despite heroic round-the-
clock, all-hands efforts and ongoing
adjustments to the protocol, they just
withered away; of the 21 chicks success-
fully hatched, 11 didn’t make it. “If the
parents are successful in feeding them for
a few days, they stimulate the immune
system somehow, seeding the gut with
gastric juices that have the full comple-
ment of gut flora,” Reillo says. “And the
result is that we have had 100 percent
success, every single nestling brought to
us that is at least three days of age lives—
a hundred percent. Doesn’t seem to mat-
ter how sickly the damn thing is. As long
as it’s not dead and the parents have fed
it, we’ll raise it fine. That’s remarkable.”
But if the parents haven’t fed it, the suc-
cess rate plummets.
And the problems with day-one chicks
seem to compound dramatically when the
chick is hatching from a day-one egg. For
one thing, these chicks were weighing in
at as much as 40 percent lighter than the
roughly 1.5 grams of a normal tiny Florida
Grasshopper Sparrow hatchling. That his-
toric first-ever chick hatched from a day-
one egg died within days—as did the next,
and the next. In all, of the dozen chicks that
Reillo miraculously managed to hatch from
day-one eggs, only one has survived. Cap-
tive breeding is not for the faint-hearted.
50 AUDUBON | FALL 2017
suspect that a common
misperception exists among
i
that subset of people who are
even aware of the Endan-
gered Species Act (ESA):
the belief that, once a species is listed as
endangered, the federal government—the
Fish and Wildlife Service in particular, if
your awareness runs that deep—has some
sort of absolute responsibility to do (and
fund the doing of ) everything possible to
keep said species from going extinct. It’s
what I thought, anyway.
Apparently, that is not the case. Early
this year, word came down that the
USFWS, which over the past four years
had disbursed more than a million dollars
in Florida Grasshopper Sparrow–recovery
funds, would not commit to further fi-
nancial support for the program. “When
I heard the bad news that this program
wasn’t going to get supported, the spar-
rows weren’t going to get any funding, it
was like getting shot in the chest,” says
Sandra Sneckenberger, who, don’t forget,
works for the USFWS. “This is what we
do, what the Fish and Wildlife Service
does: We protect endangered species. If we
don’t—isn’t the public going to wonder, ‘If
you don’t do this, who is going to do it?’ ”
But here’s the thing: The USFWS
Southeast Region office, out of Atlanta,
oversees the agency’s work in 10 states
plus Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Is-
lands. That territory is home to about 400
animal and plant species that have been
declared endangered under the ESA. (The
regional office is also obligated to evalu-
g
RARE BREED
A sparrow that fledged earlier this year is
banded and then released back to the prairie
in hopes that it will make it through the winter
and pair up next spring for a full and productive
breeding season in the wild.
ate roughly 400 additional at-risk species
to determine whether they’re candidates
to be listed.) The total annual budget for
this work is $14 million. “That’s about
$35,000 per species,” says Leopoldo Mi-
randa, the USFWS assistant regional di-
rector. (And that’s if you’re counting only
the 400 currently listed species.)
And, quite reasonably and sometimes
unreasonably, not all species are created
equal from a USFWS-funding stand-
point. For instance, captive-breeding pro-
grams for just two of them, the red wolf
and the Puerto Rican Parrot, eat up a rel-
atively hefty $1.2 million and $900,000 a
year respectively. “It’s a really tough deci-
sion, because we all want to keep fund-
ing all the species at the right levels, but
definitely we don’t have that capacity,”
Miranda says. “In terms of programs like
the red wolves and parrots, it’s mostly a
historical thing. We made that decision
‘way back when’ to have captive-breeding
populations and we’re fully committed to
those and now we are where we are.”
PHOTO BY MAC STONE
All of which is to say, while Fish and
Wildlife, from a rhetorical standpoint,
declares its undying commitment to the
Florida Grasshopper Sparrow (“I want
to be able to go back and tell everybody,
my kids, that we did everything we could
to save that species,” as Miranda puts it),
from a financial standpoint it’s stepping
aside. “There are reasons to be optimis-
tic” about the Florida Grasshopper Spar-
row’s chances of overcoming extinction,
says Larry Williams, the USFWS’s Flori-
da state supervisor for ecological services.
“But I think it’s appropriate for the Ser-
vice to say, ‘How much can we continue
to invest in this species given all the other
species we need to give attention to?’ ”
In mid-May, at the urgent behest of
other members of the working group,
Williams issued a formal letter on
USFWS stationery declaring that “our
previous funding sources are no longer
available in amounts that would fully
fund the program”—a declaration that
Reillo and others argued was essential
if they were to somehow attract outside
funding to make up the difference. As
Reillo puts it, “It’s almost impossible to
garner independent support for anything
that’s seen as a federal program.”
Since that letter was issued, a web page
has been set up under the auspices of the
Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida
to receive tax-deductible donations to
directly fund Florida Grasshopper Spar-
row recovery work. (It would be a der-
eliction of duty for me to deprive you of
that URL: fishwildlifeflorida.org/florida-
grasshopper-sparrow-fund.) But, so far at
least, no coordinated fundraising effort
has coalesced—mainly because, who has
the time? As Reed Bowman, Archbold’s
avian ecology director, who oversees the
sparrow monitoring and recovery work on
the ranch, concedes: “I’m not sure I have
the bandwidth to go out seeking founda-
tion grants for money that the Fish and
Wildlife Service used to spend.”
So as the Service’s field biologists pre-
pared to collect from the prairie the birds
that were needed to give the long-shot
captive-breeding program its best chance
to succeed, they did so without knowing
where the money to keep the program
going—hundreds of thousands a year—
would come from.
n a friday in early july,
the USFWS convened an-
O other working-group ses-
sion, something of a coda
to the 2014 meeting, this
time less about whether to collect the
birds and more about how many and from
where. Reillo attended reluctantly; his en-
closures were nowhere near complete, and
he felt the time would be far better spent
holding a drill and a staple gun than re-
litigating a decision that as far as he was
concerned had been made long ago. But
in the end he drove the two hours north
to Vero Beach. And maybe it was a good
thing that he made the trip. “There was
actually a point after five-plus hours of
deliberation where somebody said, ‘I want
to backtrack a little bit and question the
whole idea of the urgency of collection,’ ”
he said afterward, his voice still carrying
evidence of the dismay he must have felt in
the moment. “That’s when I said, ‘People,
do not kick this thing down the road. This
is the last year. I do not think they’ll be able
to collect even six pairs. And if the collec-
tion isn’t done now, then really you have to
say it’s never going to happen.’ ”
Ultimately, the decision was made to
bring in six pairs. At that point, two nests
at the ranch had already hatched; the nest-
lings were expected to fledge by the follow-
ing Thursday, so the plan was to capture
the birds on Wednesday—five days hence.
Then, over the weekend, first one nest and
then the other were swarmed with fire ants,
the nestlings killed, the parents escaping to
establish another nest somewhere nearby
and start the cycle anew.
The techs were monitoring two other
nests at the ranch, and Sneckenberger de-
cided to bring those in as early as possi-
ble. Then the storms began. “At lunch we
started getting worried about the family
we were about to collect,” Sneckenberger
says. “We had the techs go out there, and
the nest was flooded big time. Totally
flooded. And it had a just-hatched chick.
And one pipping egg with its little beak
sticking out, and one other egg.” They
raced to rescue those just-hatching birds
and rush them over to the Avon Park Air
Force Range, to place them in another
nest that was also just hatching. One of
the techs at Avon Park fed the day-one
chick overnight, and he and another tech
took turns standing vigil over the nest.
“They kept running out there to check
whether it was flooding, and ended up
lifting that nest three times,” Snecken-
berger says. “We’d have calls, and they’d
be like, ‘It’s still really wet, we can lift it
again. We’d totally be breaking all the
protocols.’ But what’s the alternative?”
The next day, the mist nets were strung
at the ranch and the techs managed to
capture the female parent and bring it to
Reillo’s enclosures; a bachelor male was
later brought in to join her. Against all
odds, every one of the eggs that had been
taken to Avon Park hatched and suc-
cessfully fledged. With luck, one or two
will survive through winter. That Friday,
another breeding pair was captured from
the other monitored nest at the ranch and
successfully transported to Rare Species.
And then, for nearly a month, the col-
lection efforts stalled: one wild breeding
pair captured, another male and a female
collected separately and cobbled together
to form a second pair, four enclosures still
empty. This pause was basically a func-
tion of the natural rhythms of the prai-
rie; as Sneckenberger explained, “The
landscape had to dry out so birds would
nest. You can’t find a pair if they’re not
nesting.” But even so, Reillo was having
a hard time containing his impatience.
“We’ve got four empty spaces that I’m
either going to fill or set on fire,” he said,
ever sardonic, on August 3. “I’m going to
put pygmy marmosets or butterflies in
them just to make a statement.”
And then, suddenly: Six new nests were
discovered. In relatively quick succession
the field biologists collected a family of
seven, then a pair, then a family of five. Fi-
nally, on Friday, August 18, Sneckenberger
and her crew netted a solo male from Three
Lakes—the final sparrow to be captured
this season, possibly ever—and delivered it
to Rare Species to be paired with a female
sparrow that had been rescued from Avon
Park in June. All of the cages had been
filled. They weren’t all proven pairs, ongo-
ing funding is yet to be secured, and there is
certainly no telling whether captive breed-
ing will ultimately succeed. But at least,
finally, the USFWS, the Florida Grasshop-
per Sparrow Working Group, and all the
rest of us will have the chance to find out
whether captive breeding can save the most
endangered bird in North America. A
Customer service: 844-428-3826 or customerser-
vice@audubon.org. The observations and opinions
expressed in Audubon magazine are those of the
respective authors and should not be interpreted
as representing the official views of the National
Audubon Society. Volume 119, Number 3, Fall 2017.
Audubon, ISSN 0097-7136, the magazine of the Na-
tional Audubon Society, will be published quarterly
in 2017 (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter). Editorial
offices: 225 Varick Street, 7th Floor, New York,
NY 10014; 212-979-3000. Audubon does not ac-
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FALL 2017 | AUDUBON 51
 THE ILLUSTRATED AVIARY

Reimagining John James Audubon’s “Birds of America”

EASTERN BLUEBIRD BY DIANNE BENNETT

artist dianne bennett grew up amid the urban sprawl of California’s San Fernando Valley. “My ex- See all of John
perience was seeing every bit of open space developed,” she says. Her work has often focused on animals James Audubon’s
in bucolic settings, but is evolving with growing environmental concerns. “Now,” she says, “it’s almost Birds of America
BOTTOM (DETAIL): JOHN JAMES AUDUBON

like humanity’s starting to take over the painting.” The human footprint is obvious in her depiction of at audubon.org/
Audubon’s male Eastern Bluebird, which she rendered in oil paint on a salvaged road construction sign. birds-of-america.
It soars across smattered squares and triangles that signify buildings. The green patches symbolize dwin-
dling natural areas, while milky swirls evoke the cosmos. The outlook isn’t all bad: A small box in the right
corner represents abodes people build to help these birds thrive. Bennett has painted bluebirds on various
canvases, including a vintage 1948 Kit Companion trailer that she and husband Chris Engle (son of for-
mer longtime Audubon board member Helen Engle) haul around the Pacific Northwest. “Bluebirds are
iconic,” says Bennett. It’s a sentiment shared by John James Audubon, who described the eastern species,
the most widespread of the three, as “one of the most agreeable of our feathered favorites.” —Julie Leibach

52 AUDUBON | FALL 2017

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AMERICAN WHITE PELICANS. PHOTO: ALEJANDRO PRIETO/BIOSPHOTO/MINDEN PICTURES
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SNOWY PLOVER. PHOTO: DENNIS GOODMAN/AUDUBON PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS