Links in the Chain: International Migratory Bird Day
Hybrid between a Eurasian and American wigeon spotted near Gakona.
Photo by Laurie DeWispelaere.
By Allison Sayer
International Migratory Bird Day (IMDB) is celebrated annually on the second Saturday of May in Canada and the United States, and the second Saturday of October in Central and South America and the Caribbean. Numerous conservation organizations celebrate this day with outreach events meant to engage neighbors with migratory birds.
Copper Valley residents have faithfully participated in the citizen science component of IMDB for decades. Individuals are encouraged to submit lists of the birds they see on IMDB to a centralized source. Through each of these individual observations, a snapshot can be created of bird migration at a global scale. This year’s “Global Big Day” set four world records including the number of countries and people participating and the number of species observed.
Laurie DeWispelaere started the Copper Valley participation in IMDB in 1996. She would call an informal network of people throughout the region from Kenny Lake to Sourdough, asking that they all observe birds and submit lists. Early regulars included Brad Henspeter, Ken Roberson, Ruth McHenry and Althea Hughes. These people would all count birds in their own areas, and try to cover some others, with Ruth McHenry providing one of the only regular counts for the Kenny Lake area.
A few years after DeWispelaere started the Copper Valley count, Mary Howarth-Hernandez and Barb Goozen became regular IMDB participants. An informal group formed, making a day of both birding around the area and socializing. Sometime around 2005, Goozen’s husband Rick Goozen humorously dubbed the group the “Birding Association of Gakona, Glennallen, and Sourdough,” or BAGGS. Members of BAGGS provide the majority of local IMDB bird observations to this day. The original BAGGS were DeWispelaere, Hughes, Howarth-Hernandez, and Goozen, in Glennallen and Gakona, and Nina Carter and Tim and Kathy Stevens in the Sourdough area.
DeWispelaere remembered, “Mary even had t-shirts and car magnets made that say: BAGGS Brake for Birds! Another fun story is Althea has clever names for things. We'd happen to see a bird in the top of a Black Spruce and discover it really wasn't a bird so she'd call those "Ecurps" (Spruce spelled backwards and the c is pronounced like in ‘curbs.’) We always fondly think of Althea whenever we are birding. She has helped organize us, called all the counters, tallied up all the data and then wrote the newspaper article. We really miss her! Althea Hughes and Ken Roberson were the ‘go to’ people in the Valley if anyone had bird questions. Ken kept track of FOS (First of Spring) dates for each bird.” Roberson is now retired and living in the southwest. Hughes, now 97, just moved to the Lower 48 recently to be with family.
Currently, Katie Bobowski and Carrie Wittmer provide the observer coordination and data entry. Bobowski and Wittmer work for Prince William Sound Community College and the National Park Service, respectively, but their efforts in this team are volunteer, not affiliated with their work. The Wrangell Institute for Science and the Environment (WISE) has also contributed to publicizing this grassroots event in the Copper Valley.
Katie Bobowski spots a rusty blackbird in a wetland on the Scott property.
Photo by Allison Sayer.
In the early days, members of BAGGS sent the bird count data to the Fish & Wildlife Service. IMDB data are currently submitted to eBird, a website that manages a massive dataset composed of individual bird observations from around the world.
Between the late spring regionally and the second Saturday in May being early in the month this year, the 2021 IMDB Copper Valley count was relatively slow. Still, 3,767 individual birds were counted. The most numerous was the Lapland longspur, with 502 individuals. The most unusual bird for this area sighted was a hybrid between an American and Eurasian wigeon. Often, a ruddy duck makes an appearance in Kenny Lake, which is remarkable because it is far outside of its usual range. However, this duck was not in attendance this year.
In 2018, Cornell Lab of Ornithology Senior Scientist Ken Rosenberg and a team of researchers did a comparative study of bird observations compiled from 1970 to 2017. These data came from academia, long-term data sets from public agencies, and observations from the general public. Rosenberg’s team estimated a deficit of 2.9 billion birds in 2017, compared to 1970. This observation was also supported by watching radar observations of migratory bird biomass across the North American continent. Ordinary people contributed to this study by participating in large scale annual counting efforts such as the Audubon Christmas Bird Count. While this study is sad news, it has also helped to prompt increased conservation action.
In a virtual presentation organized by WISE in April (video available at WISE-edu.org), Bureau of Land Management Wildlife Program Lead Casey Burns referenced Rosenberg’s daunting study. In addition, he noted many of Alaska’s birds nest in habitat that is considered highly vulnerable to climate change, including the arctic, boreal forest, western forest, and wetlands. Other threats to birds that nest here include collisions with man-made structures, plastics, food regime and chemical shifts in the ocean, pollution, domestic cats, a decline in insects that birds eat, invasive species, and habitat loss.
Burns highlighted international cooperative efforts in bird monitoring and conservation in his talk. With so many species, which occupy so many niches, and go in so many different directions, no individual researcher, agency, or country, can go it alone.
The Breeding Bird Survey is a shared effort to create a long-term data set with consistent monitoring of over 4,000 sites in Canada, the US, and Mexico. The Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF) is the biodiversity working group of the Arctic Council, which is composed of representatives from 8 arctic countries, 6 Indigenous people’s organizations, and Arctic Council observers.
The Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network is a series of sites from Alaska to southern South America which are conserved collectively for shorebird habitat. The East Asian Australasian Flyway Partnership (EAAFP) brings the United States together with Asian, Australian and New Zealand governments, NGOs, and intergovernmental organizations to strengthen every link in the chain of sites essential to birds along that flyway. Even North Korea, often absent from international partnerships, participates in the EAAFP.
Townsend’s solitaire spotted at mile 3.5 of the Tok cutoff on International Migratory Bird Day.
Photo by Laurie DeWispelaere.
The international efforts are impressive, but individuals continue to play an important part in providing fine scale observations of where birds go. Birds are simply too mobile to go strictly to “monitored” locations. For example, area resident Laura Scott shared that when her front yard flooded during spring breakup, “I opened the front door in the morning and there were 60 ducks!”
It only takes a brief look at the “abundance animations” created by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology using eBird data to be awed by the power of individuals to contribute to the big picture.
Annual counts can protect birds from a phenomenon Burns warned about: “shifting baselines.” People tend to think that whatever is going on around them is the norm. Americans in the lower 48 don’t miss the massive flocks of passenger pigeons that used to darken the sky. Those alive in the shadow of those flocks could not have conceived of a world in which those birds would be extinct.
We can’t see trends without baseline data. The juncos, sparrows, and other common birds around us don’t seem to be particularly notable. But what if the hundreds dwindled to dozens? We wouldn’t know a change had occurred without having provided something to compare it with from an earlier time.
We don’t understand the things around us every day to be remarkable. We should rejoice at the sight and sound of every American robin. They went into a severe decline as a result of DDT pollution in the mid-20th century but recovered. The same can be said of snowy egrets in the Lower 48, which are today among species of “least concern.” They were almost exterminated by the feather trade.
The robin and the egret survived because enough people, with enough power, decided the world they wanted to live in had robins and egrets in it. The passenger pigeon, and most likely the eskimo curlew, did not. It’s a lot to think about sitting in a beach chair by a mostly frozen lake on the side of the Richardson Highway, counting gulls, ravens and eagles awaiting the start of fishwheel season, listening for songbirds hidden in the barely budding shrubs and trees.
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