This is a memoir of a COVID-invigorated Bird Spotter and his July 2021 journey from Half Moon Bay to the pinnacles of the Southeast Farallon Islands, and waters beyond, in search of pelagic birds: puffins, shearwaters, storm-petrels, and albatross. My thanks go to Alvaro Jaramillo …
For thousands of years, domesticated pigeons have been an integral part of human life. Egyptian hieroglyphics and stone carvings in Mesopotamia (now modern Iraq) indicate that these birds were domesticated at least 5,000 years ago. Over centuries they have been kept as symbols of prosperity, …
It was the summer of 1954 when my childhood hobby of birds’ egg collecting came to an end. The British government implemented the Protection of Birds Act, 1954 that forbid me to take wild birds’ eggs, and at the same time, protected adults and their nests from human interference. The United States had many years earlier, in 1918, introduced similar legislation through its Migratory Bird Treaty Act that applied to approximately 1100 species, but which excluded non-native types such as house sparrows, European starlings, and pigeons.
Where I lived, up until the mid-1950s, it was normal to go “bird nesting” and gather the eggs you found to build up your egg collection. I never thought about the consequences on bird populations. Even after it was illegal, I refused to throw away my assortment of eggs. More about my egg collecting habits can be found in my two novels Unplanned and She Wore a Yellow Dress.
With these strict new controls, you would have expected bird populations to boom, but this has not always been the case. The reasons are complicated and below I try to describe some of the important aspects of avian demographics. At the end of this paper, I illustrate the decline using the European skylark and North America bobolink.
A. Background data
B. The skylark and the bobolink
Two examples of bird species under serious threat are the Eurasian skylark and the American bobolink (named for its bubbling “Bob O’Lincoln” song). The species are not related. The bobolink is a member of the blackbird family and the skylark belongs to the lark group of birds; only its cousin, the horned lark, is native to North America. Both species rely on grassland and farmland, which are the habitats in North America that have suferred the greatest loss of bird population during the past 50 years, with a 53 percent decline and a reduction of half a billion birds.
Both species symbolize the countryside’s return of summer. Males deliver a bubbly, metallic song, often fluttering high above the fields, as they look for mates. Their melody has been associated with joy, freedom and enthusiasm, and has inspired poets such as Emily Dickinson, Shelley, Tennyson and Wordsworth. Both species nest on the ground, but that is where the similarities end.
Their appearance is distinctively different as the illustrations below show.
The bobolink migrates between southern Canada and the northern states to southern South America twice a year, a return journey of approximately 12,500 miles (20,000 km). In contrast, skylarks generally do not migrate. However, the two species are known to appear in each other’s territory and both are suffering serious declines in their native habitat.
Skylarks, while still common in the UK with a population of about 1.7 million, are calculated to have experienced a population decline of around 75 percent since the early 1970s. The switch in agriculture from spring to fall sown cereals has interfered with the birds’ food supply; the move from hay to silage has caused nests to be destroyed by machinery due to earlier harvesting; and on grasslands, intensified stock grazing exposes nests to trampling and makes them more accessible to predators. Efforts to reverse this trend are underway and include more organic farming, providing incentives for sowing spring crops, and implementing standards to prevent nest destruction. Indications at the present time are that these steps are stabilizing the population of skylarks
The plight of the bobolink is similar that of the skylark, with its population having declined around 65 percent since 1970. Even so, it is fairly common, with a breeding population of around eight million, of which 28 percent breed in Canada and 72 percent in the United States. Habitat destruction is the main cause for their loss of breeding territory, and it has to contend with dangerous pesticides in its wintering locations and is often treated as an agricultural pest. While on migration, it is hunted as food in places such as Jamaica.
Efforts are underway to control these interferences, with bans on dangerous pesticides, encouraging working farms to establish additional grassland, maintaining larger fields that apparently are preferred by the bobolink, and probably, most important of all, incentivizing farmers to mow hay fields outside the breeding season.
During the 1950s and 1960s, as a young birder in the north of England, I ignored the rather common, drab and inconspicuous-looking birds known as house sparrows and tree sparrows. Both are Old World species, distributed across Europe and Asia, and rarely migrate significant distances. …
Blue-crowned mot mot The first resplendent quetzal I ever saw was on April 5, 1998 in the Monteverde Cloud Forest, Costa Rica. The species is considered by many to represent the most beautiful bird in the world, and although it was partially obscured by …
Growing up in Yorkshire, I called them waterhens (now more usually known as moorhens). They are humble birds, preferring freshwater wetlands, and are sedentary, except that they are joined by birds moving from north-west Europe to winter in the UK. As their name implies, they are the size and shape of a chicken, they “cluck” like a hen, and lay a similar number of eggs. As a child, I sat on the edge of ponds and talked to the birds as they sat incubating their eggs on bulky platforms of reed stems. Usually there were 6 to 10 eggs in the nest, one laid each day, but occasionally the number was as high as 15 to 20, a sign that cooperative breeding was taking place. My novel Unplanned gives you a sense of why I connected so closely with these birds.
Common moorhen nest and eggs
When they were disturbed, the sitting bird would quietly slip off the nest and disappear into the bulrushes. The dark brown plumage on their back and wings, and the bluish-black feathers on their belly made it difficult to see them among the vegetation or afloat on the dark-colored water. I would try to spot their chunky bright red bill with its citrus-yellow tip, or look for the white stripes on the flank. As soon as I left, I knew the waterhen would return to its nest. They are mainly sedentary birds, rarely leaving their territory, although you could see them poking around on land during winter when the ponds froze over.
Some of my ornithological experts called them moorhens even though the last place you would find them would be on the moors. It turns out that the word “moor” is derived from the old English word “mere”, which in turn gives rise to the word “marsh”. This made sense since I occasionally visited Hornsea Mere, a large expanse of freshwater near the south-east coast of Yorkshire, where I would see many moorhens.
Common moorhen Range Map
When I moved to the California in 1979 I thought I was still seeing moorhens, but was told that they were common gallinules, apparently the Latin word for “small hen”. To me they looked the same. They walked on floating vegetation and behaved secretively, just like the ones I knew back home. However, after much debate, they were declared a separate subspecies. Apparently they “cluck” differently from moorhens, and there are slight morphological differences affecting their red truncated frontal shield. The species inhabits the southern US, central America, and a large part of South America, and is just one of the birds I discovered in California where they use a different name from the one used in Europe.
Apparently, this North America bird also has a relative on the Hawaiian Islands of O’ahu and Kaua’i, known as the ‘Alae ’Ula (burnt forehead). Legend has it that the bird brought the fire from the volcano to the gods of the Hawaiian people, but during the flight the bird’s white forehead was scorched red by the volcano’s fire.
Common gallinule Range Map
I later discovered this “same-bird, different-name” phenomenon applies to other species in North America. For example:
Other species of chickadee are unique to North America, except for the gray-headed chickadee which is called the Siberian tit throughout its domicile in northern Eurasia.
But back to moorhens and gallinules. There is another relative in the United States known as the purple gallinule that inhabits freshwater swamps and marshes in the southeastern states of the US. They have brilliant purple, blue, and green feathers, and while I have not seen one in California, they have a reputation for vagrancy, with individuals traveling as far west as here, and all the way down to the Galapagos Islands.
Whether they are called moorhens or gallinules, all these birds remain common and widespread, and generally are not at risk from climate change and other interventions, although loss of habitat is a general threat. In the UK, however, the moorhen is on the Amber conservation list because of its population decline during the 1970s and 1980s, and the current reduced clutch sizes during breeding, which possibly indicates a higher level of predator interference.
Purple gallinule
Meet the Eurasian common cuckoo bird and the North American brown-headed cowbird, both brood parasites. As a boy many years ago in northern England, I pursued a little brown bird called a hedge sparrow, flicking its tail and shuffling through dense bramble undergrowth and …
Eurasian/common teal bird (male) The first Eurasian or common teal I ever saw was a flock flying south over the sea at Spurn Point, Yorkshire, in England, during the early 1960s, presumably on their way to their wintering grounds around the Mediterranean. Spurn Point …
As a small wader and member of the plover family of birds, the dotterel is known for its friendly, sweet and trusting behavior towards humans. Consequently, it was hunted for sport, was easily caught, eaten by royalty as a delicacy during English Tudor times, and its brightly-colored feathers were used for fishing lures. Today, in Britain, it receives the highest conservation priority on the UK Red List of most endangered species.
I have never seen one of these medium-sized birds, or at least I have never been able to identify one. Many years ago, I and a friend watched a bird that flew like a plover and displayed the characteristic run-stop-and tilt-forward feeding behavior of species belonging to this bird family, but it did not display the usual plumage we associated with plovers. It was almost certainly a dotterel since I had already seen the more typical types of plover in Britain. I simply scribbled a note describing our sighting but took no further action. In my novel She Wore a Yellow Dress I describe some of my other bird watching disappointments. For example, I failed to see a peregrine falcon during a 1966 outing in Essex (chapter 12).
You can imagine dotterels running among the heath and grass of upland Scotland where today some 500 males incubate and rear their young? They nest on high, dry tundra. The female often ends the relationship with the male once the eggs are laid, leaving the male to take care of the offspring, and sometimes flies off as far away as Norway or Finland to find a new mate.
Dotterel nesting
Dotterels display a colorful plumage, especially during the breeding season, when their reddish/chestnut-colored underparts are at their brightest. Their back is streaked grey and a warm brown, they have a black belly, and possess a broad white eye stripe and white band around their neck. The bill is short and the legs are yellow. They also appear along the British coasts during the spring and autumn migrations as they move between northern Europe and North Africa and the Middle East.
Dotterel Range Map: orange – breeding; blue – wintering
There are very few left breeding in Britain. A population decrease of nearly 60 percent has occurred during the past 30 years due to global warming. Breeding ranges have retreated up hill and the birds’ nesting pattern has altered because of vegetation change and a reduction in snow cover. With a longer season for vegetation growth, some nesting areas have been lost to long grass, and the early disappearance of snow that reduces the availability of insects lessens the areas where the dotterel can feed. Currently, the species nests in parts of Scotland and on occasion in the English Lake District. Not surprisingly, the Scottish Gaelic name for the dotterel translates into “the fool of the moors”.
Killdeer
You only find dotterels in North America as a casual visitor, although a few do make the journey from Siberia to Alaska, and nest in the west of the state. The first recorded sighting in California of a dotterel was on the Farallon Islands, off San Francisco, in September 1974, and every few years additional sightings are reported, including at Point Reyes only a few miles from where I live. So maybe one day I can add this species to my Life List of birds, but in the meantime I accept the abundant and perky, noisy killdeer, as the substitute.
My final comment has to do with climate change. It is not just the dotterel that is affected, but birds generally, and in particular those that migrate. British birds arrive on average 9 days earlier than in the past and are slowly pushing their range northwards. American robins arrive in the Rockies two weeks earlier and before worms and other food are available for their offspring. Some non-migratory birds such as the British great tit nests too late to make use of the abundant caterpillars that emerge earlier because of warmer winters. Plants leaf sooner, that in turn causes leaf-eating larvae to hatch sooner. Rising temperatures, flooding, drought, wildfires, and sea level changes are all affecting the traditional habitat of birds and interfering with their food supplies.
Eurasian Red-Backed Shrike I must have been aged 13 at the time during the 1950s, when looking down near the blade of the spade, I spotted a large round object. It was dirty black, except for a distinctive blue-green patina caused by its copper …
European goldfinch (left) and American goldfinch (right) The European goldfinch, a native of Europe, North Africa and central Asia, was such an attractive bird that hundreds of thousands were taken from the wild to become cage birds in Britain less than 100 year ago. This …
A Word from Hilda
The last two years have been quite an adventure. I never knew how fortunate I was to be alive. All my thanks go to my parents, but especially to my mother, who through her warmth, gave me a happy and caring childhood. It has been like a marathon having people guide and cheer me along the way. It was a race finding the truth about my German ancestry before it was too late. I must thank the author for all his hard work and endless hours of translating, researching, and writing.
Since I can remember, my mother always spoke about her wonderful childhood in Berlin and the beautiful home she grew up in. She told me about the staircase banister she would always slide down, which got her in trouble with her mother. Two years ago, when I was finally able to see that banister, I could imagine my mother as a child laughing as she went down that railing. After we left Berlin, I was visiting the Schoenbrunn Palace in Vienna when it hit me how different my life would have been if Adolph Hitler had not persecuted Jews. I would’ve led a more prosperous and sophisticated existence.
The more information I found, the angrier I became about what had happened to my family. Ultimately, they were so proud to be United States citizens.
As I come to the conclusion of this story, I am pleased that my family continued with their new life in America and did not let the horrible injustices they experienced under Nazi persecution affect them for the rest of their lives. My mother would always say they had suffered enough for many generations to come.
