Wildlife Photography

I contacted my friend the blackbird late this evening and asked him about the incident. He was still fuming (blackbirds have short tempers) because he was sick and tired of all the outstretched hands that held no peanuts. Apparently there has been an upswing in the number of birders in Central Park and more and more of them stop by and hold out their hand with nothing in it.

He says he wastes a lot of time and energy flying to an empty hand. Usually he will just give the offender a gentle peck to remind them that he doesn't like to be tricked but he said that today a guy was repeatedly holding out his empty hand and he decided to teach the guy a lesson. In addition to pecking his empty hand, he gave the guy a gentle peck on the head for good measure. He didn't think he hurt him because, as he told me, all birds know that birders have thick skulls.

He was also upset because so many of the birders in the park these days seem only interested in warblers. He thinks he's a pretty interesting bird and doesn't understand this human obsession with warblers.

I warned him to go a little easier on the foodless ones--they were probably just showing-off to friends. Besides, I said, there are plenty of people who do give you peanuts. If you do something rash it may come back to bite you in the....well wherever.

And when I told him his attacker had played the "West Nile Virus" trump card he was shocked.

"Are they nuts? Don't they know mosquitoes spread that damn disease, not birds?" he asked incredulously.

I explained that, in the world of humans, it was a pretty standard tactic to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about ones opponent and mentioning West Nile was a perfect way to do that.

With a better understanding of the way things work in the human world, this blackbird agreed to calm down. He said he would still give people a gentle peck on their empty outstretched hands but would not attack any of them on the head again.

He said to tell the people who do feed him that he appreciates it and prefers plain unsalted peanuts. No cashews, almonds or rice cakes, please. If you really want to make a friend you can bring him some wild bird seed.

Posted by Cal Vornberger at 5/19/2007 11:02:00 PM | Permalink   

I think this is worth repeating...from the New York Times

Plovers Take Heart
By DAVID GESSNER
Wilmington, N.C.

SPRING spurs migration and for a couple of months now a great river of birds has been streaming toward us, our local woods, backyards and beaches filling up with song. For some of us spring also means a return to old battles, as we wage our local fights to make sure that the returning birds will have both the place and space to rear their young.

In recent years the plight of piping plovers has taken center stage, famously pitting drivers of recreational off-road vehicles against conservationists and inspiring bumper stickers that read “piping plovers taste like chicken” and even a song titled “Fifty Ways to Kill a Plover.” There have been some gains won in the effort to save the birds, whose population has been increasing along the New Jersey and Massachusetts shores, but there is still much work to be done along the rest of the Northeast, including in Connecticut and on Long Island.

For those fighting to protect the birds, a major frustration is human behavior. How do you convince people to hold back on their freedom to drive on the beach or to let their dogs off the leash? How do you convince these people that their freedoms can impinge on the lives of other species? Environmentalists are not fighting just political opposition but human nature. In the face of such opposition who can blame bird advocates for wanting to throw up their hands? What good do small local fights really do?

The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot. When I find myself getting overwhelmed by this sense of hopelessness I like to remember the comeback of the ospreys. Ospreys are large birds with six-foot wingspans, black masks and punk rock pompadours that make headlong dives for fish from heights of up to 100 feet, hurtling downward like carnival high divers. Though they are native to the Northeast, many of us never saw them growing up because the osprey population had been drastically reduced by the post-World War II use of DDT, which was sprayed over marshes in hopes of killing off mosquitoes.

DDT was effective at getting rid of mosquitoes, but it also found its way into the plankton, where it was eaten by small fish, which were eaten by larger fish, spreading up through the food chain. Since ospreys eat only fish, the DDT built up in the birds, ultimately impeding the female’s ability to produce enough calcium for her eggshells. This led to the parent birds committing unintentional infanticide, crushing the too-thin eggshells when they settled down to incubate their brood. By the early 1960s, the number of birds had dwindled to the point where it looked like they might be entirely wiped out in the Northeast.

One of the first to miss the ospreys was a man named Dennis Puleston, who had been studying and sketching the resident birds on Gardiners Island, off the eastern end of Long Island, since 1948. Puleston, inspired in part by his reading of environmentalist Rachel Carson, brought some samples of crushed osprey eggshells to a chemist friend named Charles Wurster, who concluded that it was indeed DDT that had compromised the shells.

Puleston was a member of a Long Island conservation group called the Brookhaven Town Natural Resources Committee, and soon Mr. Wurster and he were joined by other members of the committee, including a biology teacher named Art Cooley and Victor Yannacone, a lawyer. The four men went to court in 1966 to see if they could stop the spraying of DDT on their local marshes, presenting Mr. Wurster’s scientific evidence and Puleston’s drawings of the birds. To their own surprise, the judge ruled to block DDT use until the case went to trial, and in this way ospreys were at least partly responsible for the birth of what we now call environmental law.
Emboldened and inspired by their success, the four men started the Environmental Defense Fund and launched a campaign to ban DDT on Long Island and throughout the country. In June 1972, the federal government banned the use of DDT.

The results were immediate, and over the next decades the Northeast coast once again filled with ospreys and their wild, shaggy nests. For instance, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, there were 69 active osprey nests on Long Island in 1976, and in 2002 there were 295. For the entire state, the department estimated 91 osprey pairs in 1974 and 365 in 2002.

And while these results are heartening, for me the story is equally so. In the face of the familiar litany of environmental pessimism — not just global warming but depleted resources and the intractable crush of population — it is easy to find that your mind is numbing, curling into the mental equivalent of the fetal position. We become overwhelmed and paralyzed.

The story of the osprey reminds me that change is possible, that by fighting one small fight we can achieve results that spread well beyond our homes. It’s a story worth repeating during these embattled environmental times, a story that has practical uses in fighting for the plover, and a larger use as fuel for hope.

David Gessner is the author, most recently, of “Soaring With Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey From Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond.”

Posted by Cal Vornberger at 5/16/2007 09:32:00 PM | Permalink