Dusky-capped flycatcher (credit: mdf)

Most people know the Philadelphia suburbs for cheesesteaks and unruly sports fans. But it’s no wonder that John James Audubon started his lifelong affair with birds just 25 miles northwest of Center City, and a 20-minute drive from my natal stomping grounds. The dense, rolling woodlands of Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County where I grew up offered prime habitat for cardinals, chickadees, blue jays, wrens, and countless other species my mom loved to point out to us kids. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my mom’s avian affinities taught me not just to pay attention to the biology in my backyard but, ultimately, to consider which species lived there and why.

This weekend, novice Bay Area wildlife watchers get the chance to play field biologist in their own backyards and join forces with expert birders and scientists to gather data on the incidence, abundance, and distribution of birds. Between February 17 and 20, the 15th annual Great Backyard Bird Count invites people of all ages and experience to spend as little as 15 minutes (or as long as you like) counting birds wherever you are.

The event is a joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Audubon, and Bird Studies Canada, leading bird conservation organizations that provide a wealth of resources for participants, including tips for getting started,
regional checklists, and tools for resolving tricky identifications.

“The Great Backyard Bird Count is an excellent introductory citizen science project for any level of birder,” says Brian Sullivan, an expert on North American birds and project leader of Cornell’s online resource for birders around the world, eBird.

“You can just count the birds you see in your backyard or go to your local park and count what you see there. The idea is to get a weekend snapshot of late-winter bird distribution across the United States and to make things really simple so just about anyone can participate.”

Sullivan, who has 1,669 species on his life list, says lucky birders could see “mega-rarities” like an Iceland gull, “a very rare bird in California” spotted near Sausalito in early February, or maybe the dusky-capped flycatcher that's been living in Golden Gate Park all winter.

The largest estuary on the West Coast, the San Francisco Bay Delta provides habitat and refuge to more than 250 species of waterbirds, some (including pelicans, loons, herons, and egrets) year-round residents, others, like the Wilson’s phalarope and Sabine’s gull, on stopovers to feed and rest before resuming their long-distance migrations. As many as 800,000 birds inhabit Bay Area waterways at any given time.

To find out which birds you’re likely to see in your area, go to Cornell’s eBird, click on “View and Explore Data,” then click on “Bar Charts,” select “United States,” “California,” and then “Counties in California.” Choose your county, click “continue,” and you’ll see the occurrence of birds throughout the year.

Last year, participants entered more than 92,000 checklists with 1.4 million birds from 596 species. Their data helped researchers identify changes in abundance (including an increase in evening grosbeaks, which declined 50% between 1988 and 2006) and distribution (winter finches moving south), and spot anomalies (an Asian brown shrike in McKinley, California).

The bird counts give weekend nature lovers an easy way to help scientists gather data on a widely distributed group of animals that serve as valuable indicators of biodiversity. Because birds occupy many different “trophic” levels in food webs, eating everything from insects to fish to mammals (and, for top predators like owls, hawks, and eagles, other birds), they play critical roles in maintaining healthy ecosystems. Among their many “ecosystem services,” all of which benefit humans, birds help regulate prey populations, facilitate plant reproduction through pollination and seed dispersal, and recycle nutrients by scavenging carcasses.

This widespread influence on their environment also makes them extremely sensitive to ecosystem disruptions, including habitat destruction and climate change. An alarming 13% of the world’s birds, 1,253 species, face extinction, according to the 2011 IUCN Red List. The Great Indian bustard, a native of India and Pakistan that barks when alarmed, has been reclassified as critically endangered, a victim of hunting and widespread habitat destruction. Scientists think fewer than 250 mature birds remain.

Closer to home, black-crowned night herons and snowy egrets have been on a downward slide since 2005. And the endangered California clapper rail, once abundant in the tidal marshes of San Francisco Bay, offers a case study in the unintended consequences of development. Extensive filling and diking of the bay has destroyed some 85% of the clapper rail’s salt marsh habitat, making a shy species that seems to prefer scampering over swimming and flying easy pickings for feral cats and invasive red foxes, which now have unfettered access to adults and their ground-nesting offspring.

California clapper rail (Don Roberson)

Roughly 60% of the critically endangered clapper rail population, estimated at between 1,000 and 1,500, lives in San Francisco Bay’s Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge, in Fremont.

Researchers will use the information collected from the bird count to learn how birds like the clapper rail are coping with these new predation pressures, as well as other stresses from ongoing urbanization, global climate change, and disease.

The decline of suitable habitat for these species affects us as well. Tidal marshes filter contaminants to enhance water quality and serve as natural flood barriers. If the marshes can no longer support species like the clapper rail, chances are they can’t provide these ecosystem services for us either.

Birds are among the most diverse and ubiquitous vertebrates on the planet and often offer humans a first brush with wildlife.

As a little girl, I marveled that my mom always knew when Jenny Wren and her husband, Joe (as she liked to call the resident house wrens), would appear in our backyard, build their nest, and settle into the business of raising, feeding, and protecting their broods.

She couldn’t have known that scientists would one day blame the precipitous declines in Bewick’s wrens in the eastern United States on the expansion of her beloved house wrens, known for ejecting eggs, and even young, from coveted nest sites.

Blue jay (Liza Gross)

As I listened to Mom’s fanciful tales of avian domestic dramas, my young imagination conjured all manner of worrisome scenarios. Would Joe find enough food for the babies? Could Jenny protect them from a torrential summer downpour? How would either of them cope with a curious cat? Some may shudder at such anthropomorphizing, but I wonder: If more people viewed birds the way my mom did, struggling to survive like the rest of us, would they worry about their welfare, too?

Henry David Thoreau first said “In wildness is the preservation of the world” in a lecture some months after Audubon’s death. I like to think, had they discussed the question, Audubon would have objected: “My dear sir, I believe you meant to say, ‘In birds is the preservation of the world.’ ”

The life history cycles of the bay checkerspot butterfly and its host plant, Plantago, don’t match up anymore. When the butterfly eggs hatch, the plant is no longer edible. Photo: kqedquest.

Tomorrow is our summer solstice—the longest day of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere. For folks in the Southern Hemisphere, tomorrow is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. The solstices occur thanks to the tilt of the earth. Humans have been recognizing and celebrating the solstices throughout history; Stonehenge is just one example. But we humans are not the only creatures that pay attention to day length. The life cycles of myriad plants and animals are controlled by the length of the day.

Many plants and animals are sensitive to the photoperiod, or day length. As day length grows longer throughout the springtime, many species of plants begin to flower. Other plants are triggered to reproduce when the day length becomes shorter. In these plants, a protein is actually responding to the number of hours of darkness, not to the hours of light. Many animals respond to day length, too. For many bird species, a critical day length initiates their reproductive maturation and is their cue to begin migrating. Decreasing day length also prompts hibernation in many animals. In all of these examples, photoperiod is controlling organisms’ phenology—the timing of life events, like plant flowering and bird egg laying. Phenology is often tied to the seasons, because of organisms’ responses to day length.

Phenology can also be controlled by other factors, like temperature and the amount of rainfall. As the days grow warmer because of climate change, the timing of organisms’ life cycles is shifting. Spring happens earlier than it used to, and many springtime life events are happening earlier too. In major 2003 study of nearly 700 species, including birds, insects, frogs, flowering plants, and trees, 62% of species’ life cycles had shifted over an average of 45 years. Birds and frogs bred earlier, migrating birds and butterflies arrived sooner, and plants flowered and buds burst earlier.

This is likely leading to a widespread phenological mismatch; while some organisms are responding to earlier springtime temperatures, other organisms are still tracking day length. This means that insects emerge ready to feed on particular plants, but the plants are not yet edible. The insects don’t get their food, and the plants don’t get pollinated. Or migrating birds arrive hungry, and their food source has not yet ripened.

It is difficult to know to what extent phonological mismatches are taking place. A proper study of phenology requires a lot of data—many widespread observations of when a particular plant is flowering, or when and where a particular migratory bird is present. This is where you come in. The National Phenology Network has a citizen science program that allows people across the country to record their observations of plants and animals. This crowd-sourced data will be used to determine the extent and effects of shifts in the timing of organisms’ life cycles.

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Image Credit: Alex Wild.

For those of us fighting losing battles against them in our kitchens, ants are just ants. But the species responsible for the majority of those invasions has a name: the Argentine ant.

Argentine ants have had amazing success as an invasive species in the US. Their West Coast super colony numbers in the billions and spans from Mexico to Oregon. But aside from invading homes, they've had a dramatic effect on native ants and local ecosystems.

While many of us may not think ants are particularly important, ants hold a number of key ecological jobs, as I learned in this week's story. They disperse seeds, aerate soil just like earthworms, and recycle nutrients just like nature's garbage men (well, garbage women. Worker ants are actually female). For more on ants throughout the world, check out this QUEST TV story.

Listen to the QUEST radio story Bay Area Ant Invasion

Argentine ants are certainly tiny, but thanks to their numbers, they've out-competed native ants for resources and attacked their colonies. So, many of the ecological jobs that native ants do are disappearing. Scientist have also documented the decline of coastal horned lizards, which depend on native ants a food source.Check out an interactive map of native ants.

Citizens are helping track Argentine ants and their impact on native ants through a citizen science project, the Bay Area Ant Survey, run by the California Academy of Sciences. You can find more information on how to submit ant specimens of your own here. And for a little more about how they're collected, check out this post by QUEST's Jessica Neely.

In their native range in Argentina, these ants aren't such a nuisance. They don't form the super colonies that we see in North America. It's almost a terrible ecological irony: since the ants in the US descended from a small group introduced by humans, they're genetically similar. So, colonies that would normally fight over resources now see each other as relatives. With no ant wars, they've put that energy into expanding.

So, what can we do when Argentine ants show up in our kitchens?

I asked the two scientists I interviewed for this story and their answers were pretty fascinating.

First, Cal Academy's Brian Fisher on the use of chemicals:

Second, UC Berkeley's Neil Tsutsui on what makes our homes look so good to ants:

Listen to the Bay Area Ant Invasion radio report online.

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Bay Area birders participate in the Audubon Christmas Bird
Count. Credit: terriem on flickr.com

Though it's easy to forget, any kid with a magnifying glass can tell you that you don't need a fancy degree to be a scientist. All it takes is a curious mind and a keen eye for observation. And in case the mere thought of a world full of wonders isn't enough to get you motivated, there are dozens of ways your personal observations can contribute to formal, published research. It's called "citizen science".

The idea behind citizen science is that ordinary folks, spread all across the country (or the world!), can collect valuable data on a breadth and scale that would be impossible for a single researcher to do on her own. It's particularly suited to projects that require lots of field observations but not a lot of special tools – things like counting creatures or measuring snow. And while the Internet has made the process of recruiting volunteers and reporting data easier than ever, for most projects, no technology is necessary. One of the oldest citizen science projects, the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count, has been happening for over a hundred years!

In case you have any doubts about whether a scattered group of untrained citizens can really produce valuable data, just check out this week's headlines about how climate change is affecting bird populations (they're moving north). The news is based on an Audubon Society study that looked at 40 years worth of citizen-produced information.

So how can you get involved? There are all kinds of projects, some that are ongoing, others that happen at a particular time. Here are a few to consider:

• From February 13th – 16th, 2009, you can participate in the 12th annual Great Backyard Bird Count, another Audubon Society project (in partnership with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology), either on your own or by joining up with the Sacramento Audubon Society's organized events.
• As fellow blogger Ben Burress reported last month, from March 16-28, 2009 you can monitor light pollution through Globe At Night.
• Track a plant through the seasons with Project Budburst.
• Visit AntWeb's Bay Area Ant Survey to find out how to help discover and document the native and invasive ants in the Bay Area.
• Monitor frogs in your area with Frogwatch USA.
• Keep track of the weather with the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, & Snow Network.
• Follow the Monarch butterfly migrations with a variety of projects.

There's so much science out there, just waiting for you to get involved. Go observe!

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Composite image showing centers of urban light emission
Credit: NASAWant a chance to do some "citizen" science, contribute to an international investigation, and have some fun to boot? An opportunity is coming up in March: Globe At Night. All you need is your eyes….

The problem is summed up in two words: light pollution. A good deal of light produced by human civilization–streetlights, porch lights, shopping malls, security lighting, night time work lights, store fronts, parking lot lights, billboards, neon signs, the list is lengthy–shines or reflects upward into the atmosphere, there scattering off of suspended particles, like dust grains, water droplets, ice crystals and the like.

The scattered light shines back down from the sky, and we see it as a dull nocturnal glow, sometime faint, and sometimes quite pronounced. The amount of scattering particles in the air has an effect on the brightness of the night sky, but the root of the matter is the amount of light sources whose light escapes upward. The closer you are to the heart of an urban area, the more light pollution you will be subjected to.

So what? What's so harmful about that sky glow? Sometimes it can even look kind of pretty….

Well, the fact is, if you've never seen a clear night sky far from sources of major light pollution, you may not appreciate what you're missing: the sight of a clear and dark night sky in which you can literally see thousands of stars. And if you have seen a pristinely dark night sky before, think about the fact that, in 2008, half the population of the Earth was living in cities, many of whom may never have been out of their urban worlds, and for whom the night sky is naturally a dull version of day with a handful of washed out stars above.

There are also effects of light pollution on wildlife that include disturbance of day/night sleep cycles, less cover of darkness from predators, and even effects on plant life.

Globe At Night is a program that's been going on for a few years now whose aim is to measure and monitor the varying levels of light pollution around the world by using individual people as the instruments of measurement.

And it's pretty simple to participate in. The idea is that the brighter the light pollution is in any given location, the few stars you can see. The faintest stars quickly become drowned out in the sky glow, leaving only the brighter ones for your eyes to pick out. All you have to do is go outside on one or more nights in the last half of March, find the constellation Orion (which is pretty easy to find, even in a city), and count the number of stars you see there. Then, report your count through the Globe At Night website, where you'll also be able to see the observations of everyone else around the world, as well as find full instructions for participating.

Now, calendars marked? Know where Orion is? Have a sweater handy? You're all set….

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