Monday, May 6, 2024

A Century of Change in Connecticut's Birds

John Hall Sage—an unknown name; unknown, long forgotten, even in his native Connecticut, and even though his contributions to the ornithology of his state were epic.  A founding member of the venerable American Ornithologists Union, its secretary for decades and even its president, he in an era in which quantitative was an alien term collected data—dates, locations, sexes, measurements, notes about the specimens he collected—hundreds of them, thousands even. 

And that is how I know him—from late at night, night after night and even into the early morning, in the bowels of the University of Connecticut’s collection room, amidst the overpowering scent of mothballs, alone with his catalogs, with his details about birds.  My fingers repeatedly brushed across his handwritten records, with hands holding the pages he had held, unfolding the notes he tucked among the pages, reading the records scrawled across the back of his daughter’s 1912 wedding invitation.  In this place of silent contemplation, he had become a friend of sorts, someone I knew, separated only by that troublesome quantity of time.  His catalogs spanned fifty years, and fifty years hence I learned from what he had learned as I prepared for my first season along his adored Connecticut River.  It was a place which it appeared had slipped into oblivion after his time, without any further long-term study of its inhabitants.  Likewise, his irreplaceable collection had been relegated to a basement where it sat ignored before being rescued just before I came to use it.  I have wondered if he considered whether anyone would again have the constitution to take up the quest he had begun. 

Now it is another fifty years hence as I prepare for my next season in that transcendent place, that singular landscape where, as it broods in the first breaths of an approaching day, time for a time suspends and its essence is returned to those whose tenure here far predate ours—those of bright voice, of exuberant constitution, of unparalleled loveliness.  When I began my studies, I somewhere wrote down that I would have to grow old to understand the sorts of questions that filled my head.  And, indeed, as old age and slipping vision envelops me, there does seem to be some inkling of an answer: much of what we think we know we don’t, what we see over the short term is illusion, the immutably integrated is not so but fluid.  The relationships, the interactions, all that we see, none of them remain the same.  As I also wrote to myself, the river I studied was rather an enigma, flowing continuously like time, taking what was new down its course, turning it from young to old, and then releasing it from material bonds.  From there, we cannot know what becomes of such things—once young, then old, and then free.

Sage in his collecting focused especially on the tidelands of the Connecticut River but he did not stop there.  He was as well intimately familiar with the birds dwelling within the limited tracts of forest present in Connecticut’s late nineteenth century landscape—the forest in all of its manifestations from early successional through mature.  He chronicled its birds, considered their distributions, their abundances, how these changed over the years of his observation and how what he saw fit into his friend C. Hart Merriam’s life zone concept.

So too, I realized that during my tenure I must do much the same.  By the beginning in the 1980s, I began to quantify using the techniques of the era how it was that the birds of the forest configured themselves.  I expanded my horizons by taking my forest studies to the other side of the planet before, by the beginning of the 2000s, I embarked on long-term investigations of forest birds throughout Connecticut, summer and winter, now fully a century since Sage’s initial work—work that encompassed tens of thousands of observations and tens of thousands of measurements.

A small subset of these measures examined a thirty-five-year span in an expansive managed forest in a region, corresponding roughly with the southern boundary of Merriam’s Canadian zone, with bird communities predicted to be particularly sensitive to the effects of climate change.  This work demonstrated that bird community changes indeed did show some relationships to Connecticut’s warming climate, but not always, and often trends were opposite to expectations.  Similarly, community change showed a fair number of connections with changing vegetation conditions—wildlife management 101—but not always and trends were often opposite to expectations. 

When using more sophisticated protocols over twenty years in Connecticut’s largely unmanaged, aging and more expansive Northeast Upland ecoregion, portions of which flirted with old growth conditions, these same sorts of patterns appeared, with changing climate and maturing forests appearing related to a good deal of bird community change, but again many of the changes were contrary to expectations.  Some of these contrary patterns might have been related to larger continental phenomena, but what I suspected most was that I was observing evolution in real time.  Species typically associated with successional landscapes were exploding into mature forests; those once associated with remote core forests were becoming lawn birds.  Species that at the beginning of my studies were absent were now the commonest birds in the forest.  Still others were inexplicably disappearing in conditions that should have favored them.  In short, nature appeared more complicated than we might wish it to be; it was a moving target.

Once some time back I took a private trip to Sage’s still stately home near the Connecticut River to seek out whatever of him might still remain there.  While sitting at that spot I said to him, just in case he might hear me, “John, you know, it’s just you and me.  I don’t know that anyone else would ever want to do this.  It’s too hard, the personal cost too great and I’m not sure that it matters much to anyone but us.  In any event, maybe in the not-too-distant future this is a conversation we can have together.  Until then, John, rest well.”

 

Sunday, November 15, 2020

THE RARE VERTEBRATES OF CONNECTICUT

 


The Rare Vertebrates of Connecticut, out of print for 40 years and not otherwise available on the internet, is now accessible via Bird Conservation Research, Inc.  Much has changed since this volume was released.  Species thought to be rare in the 1970s, like the Cooper's Hawk, Pine Warbler, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker and Red-bellied Woodpecker, have undergone explosive population growth and are now regular Connecticut residents.  Others, like the Ruffed Grouse and White-throated Sparrow, have declined and still others, like the Common Raven, had yet to colonize the state. 

Thinking concerning the meaning of terms like State rare and State endangered has, as a consequence, evolved  (see, for example, this).  An important conclusion to be drawn from the extent of population change observed over time is that wildlife communities are dynamic rather than static assemblages (see this).  This conclusion affects how conservation concern is evaluated and requires us to develop a more sophisticated notion of how we view rarity at the local level. See this page and click on the PowerPoint presentation Global vs. Local Perspective on Endangerment for a more-in-depth analysis of this issue.   

The Rare Vertebrates of Connecticut provides us with a useful perspective on some of the earliest thinking concerning conservation of rare species at the local level.  It is available here.

 


Saturday, February 22, 2020

INVITATION FOR AUTHORS




Arts and Academic Publishing LLC invites authors to submit their book manuscripts for publication.  Authors do not need to submit through an agent, they incur no publication expenses and they receive royalties for books sold.  A complete compilation of author instructions may be found here.  We seek peer reviewed and copy edited manuscripts that are ready for layout and publication, although we offer review and editing services for those who need them.  Our fields of interest are scholarly works in any discipline and substantive literary works.

In writing (and speaking, for that matter), use precise, concise, original language.  Do not use jargon in place of plain language.  Avoid  such common grammatical weaknesses as misuse of reflexive pronouns, use of trite words and use of expressions with origins in bureaucracies.  Bureaucratic language adds little other than superfluous words to sentences, it often replaces clear language with obtuse constructions and, in some cases, it is grammatically incorrect.

Examples of overused language include:

With that being said
With that said
That being said
That said
Having said that
Going forward
Moving forward
Look
Listen
Iconic
Unpack
Amazing
In regards to
Here's the thing
Exactly
Absolutely
Get-go


Thursday, January 16, 2020

YALE FOREST BIRD POPULATIONS INCREASE AND SHIFT SPECIES



Everyone's been sharing this link with me: https://www.courant.com/…/hc-hm-birds-connecticut-in-declin…
It is a fine article, but as I pointed out to the author, like most everything in nature the situation is much, much more complicated than simply declines of bird species. From our work at Yale Forest, we know that Connecticut bird communities are extremely dynamic, with more that 50% turnover in 35 years and population increases actually outpacing decreases- climate change, habitat change, species moving into new habitats, competition, etc. etc. all appear to play roles. The graph shows Yale Forest population increases vs. decreases for species whose continental populations are (1) increasing, (2) decreasing and (3) stable. We will have an article out soon...


Monday, October 28, 2019

ESKIMO CURLEW RESEARCH NOW AVAILABLE

Plumage states of the Eskimo Curlew
Our Eskimo Curlew research is now available as an open access document at http://www.birdconservationresearch.org/…/eskimo%20curlew%2…
It investigates the external anatomy of males vs. females and adults vs. juveniles, and identifies two previously undescribed plumage states. One of these states (see photo) exhibits prominent y-shaped markings on the breast whereas the other exhibits linear markings. It also documents, based on specimen data, the species' historical distribution.

Thursday, October 24, 2019

YALE FOREST BIRDS SHOW POPULATION INCREASE


Bird populations at Yale Forest have increased since 1985, but the amount of variability among individual study sites has also increased. As the figure shows, surveys were duplicated each year to gain a perspective of survey variability.

Unlike continental trends, which show that birds have declined by 30%, forest birds in northeastern Connecticut have undergone a 20% increase. Read about this and more in Bird Conservation Research's October newsletter: http://www.birdconservationresearch.org/pdf/bcr%20newsletter%2021-4.pdf.

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

ENDANGERED SPECIES COURSE DEBUTS


The first of the presentations for Bird Conservation Research's new course on endangered species conservation are now available.  These presentations focus on the history of endangered species conservation, the philosophical underpinnings of these efforts and the role of environmental scale in endangered species designation.  These presentations may be viewed at the BCR web site by following this link to the slideshow page.  Scroll to the bottom of the page to see Endangered Species Conservation.