 Nancy was going to do a deduction. So are you ready for me Nick? Okay. Alright everyone, welcome to our second fall western main Audubon talk. Great to have so many of you signed on. A little background as to why we asked Herb to talk this evening back in what I call the BC era before COVID. We thought it would be nice to do something that went along with the state's 200 celebration, 200 birthday celebration from an Audubon point of view. So we kind of thought this through and wondered what sorts of birds would a farmer taking an evening stroll see in the state back then and what would be the area around him really look like. So we've asked two distinguished teachers in the area to tackle these queries of ours. And tonight we're very pleased to have Herb Wilson with us to discuss the changes that have been taking place in bird populations over the last 200 years. He is professor emeritus of biology at Colby College. Some of you may have seen the films that he puts out in news media, etc. And he's certainly a well known ornithologist in the area here. On November 11th we are going to have Drew Barton from University of Maine at Farmington talking about changes in plants, the forest and the general lay of the land I guess you could say in our area as well. So I don't want to take up any more time from Herb and I am turning it over to him. Welcome and thank you for being here. Thank you for tuning in. I see a lot of old friends who have tuned in from places I didn't expect so it's nice to see a lot of those names. I've given a lot of talks at Western Maine Audubon over the last 30 years but this is of course the first virtual one I've done so I'm looking forward to it. And ironically I think this is the biggest audience I've ever had. I'm going to switch to my power. So much has happened over the last 200 years in the case of birds and of course the farther back we go the more nebulous it becomes because we obviously didn't have a whole lot of hard data on bird abundance 150-200 years ago. But we do have ways of being detectives and trying to understand what is going on with our bird. So tonight what I'm going to do is to not talk about all 459 species of birds that have been found in Maine but rather I'm going to break them down into several categories. So first we're going to talk about birds that we used to have but we don't anymore. So these are birds that were resident in Maine and are now extinct. So I'm going to talk about very unusual birds. The great naturalist Roger Torrey Peterson had a quotation that I liked and said birds have wings and they use them. So we have lots and lots of birds that have been found in Maine that are out of place. How in the world did you get here? So what we're going to do is to quickly go through and enjoy those birds that have only been seen once or twice in the state. Then the rest of the talk we're going to talk about birds that are holding steady and then we're going to talk about birds that have increased in Maine and some in fact have invaded Maine even in the last 30 or 40 years. And then to end we're going to talk about birds that are not doing so well. This is a topic that I can talk on for hours so I'm going to try to speak for about 40 minutes or so so we can leave time for questions. But let's first start with the birds that have been extirpated largely through the hands of humans in the last 200 years. With the great awk which was a flightless bird. It was found in Maine and let me take a look at this map here and you can see in the breeding areas where up in Newfoundland off of Prince Edward Island and up in Greenland and in Iceland. This was a bird that was on the north Atlantic but we know that they wintered all down through New England so we certainly had them here. And of course being flightless they were susceptible to easily being captured and they were captured by fishermen for food, for fat to use as bait for fish and they were also collected for feathers. Eggs were easy pickings during the breeding season so that was a problem as well. So the population declined pretty quickly once humans started harassing them. The last one was sighted in Canada in Bremenan Island just a stone's throw from Louvac, Maine in 1872 the last one was seen in London. So a species that would love to see but of course we can't. And of course this is the mascot of the American Ornithologist Union, what's now the American Ornithological Societies. The genus name of the great awk is Pin Guiness, P-I-N-G-U-I-N-E-U-S which means fat and that's certainly appropriate. But a lots of sailors that went down to the Antarctic and there they saw the equivalent of the great awk, flightless birds, and knowing the name Pin Guiness for the great awk they started calling the birds down there penguins. So our great awk is the inspiration for penguins it's not penguins are the inspiration for the great awk's penguin-like shape. Anyway, no longer with us another nice drawing of great awk. It's a hybrid or duck which is a bird that we don't know a whole heck of a lot about. We don't even know where they nested but we do know that they wintered off the coast of New England in the mid-Atlantic state so you can see where they spent time on the coastal areas north and mid-Atlantic. So knowing very little about them is certainly very frustrating because the last one was seen in 1873 and we don't really understand very well why they went extinct. They don't seem to have been common enough for humans to have been bothered with them very much but it's a species that never lost scientific interest. So very beautiful looking diving duck. And then perhaps the saddest of all, a passenger pigeon 250 years ago was estimated at five billion birds which means that they made up a quarter of the birds in North America. And of course they are all gone now. You can see perhaps it's sort of hard to see the lines but this line here represents their breeding range or their range and this dotted line here which includes part of Maine is where they did most of their breeding. So this is the heaviest concentration of these birds. But no mag birds wanted huge flocks. John James Audubon saw a flock in Kentucky that darkened the sky for four days and he estimated the population of that flock at 1.2 billion birds. And his contemporary Alexander Wilson had a similar flock and he came up with about 2 billion birds to imagine that in one flock. But these were colonial nesters and the colonies seemed to be hundreds of thousands of birds. Hundreds of thousands of birds. And it is thought by some that if the population wasn't big enough, hugely big enough, then the reproductive organs of the birds wouldn't develop and they would not be able to reproduce. They were harvested in huge numbers by gunners for food and shipped mostly to the New York area. But just because they're so colonial, they were easily captured and there's no question that human hands caused the demise of these birds. They were seen in the fives and tens in the 1880s and 1890s. In the fives in 1900, the analogy union put out a reward between 1910 and 1912 for anyone that could find a living passenger pigeon and they never spent their money. The last one died Martha in 1914 in the 1780s. And finally there's a couple more passenger pigeons and here's just one of these flocks you can imagine how easy it would be to take huge numbers of these birds. And then the final one is actually a species, but a subspecies of the greater prairie chicken. It was called the heath hen. So if you take a look at this, there are three subspecies of the greater prairie chicken. There's the main subspecies found here. There's Atwater's prairie chicken down here in Oklahoma, South Oklahoma. And then there was for a while the heath hen which was found in the east and it barely sneaked up into Maine. This was a bird of scrub over the forest around the Kennebec plains as an example would have been a good place to look for heath hens. And they did go extinct. The last one in mainland eastern North America was seen in 1870, but some persisted on to in Martha's Vineyard until 1932 around as well. And here's a photograph of the 1932 birds. They were around since photography was emitted. So we can actually have pictures of these birds, unlike the other ones that are now extinct. And there's a stuffed specimen, one of these birds. So now let's talk about some fun birds. Birds that you say, what? How in the world did this bird get here? And one example is this European bird that can ring plover. It was seen in Lubeck, on the south Lubeck, Sambar flats, which is a whole not like a semi-pollimated plover, doesn't it, but has a distinctive call. So it was picked out by Louis Bavir and others as a common ring plover. Fantastic sighting. Kirkland's warbler. Unusual bird they found in the forest in Upper Lower Peninsula, Michigan, and also a few other places. But the population was down to 200 at one point, mostly because of cowbird, blue parasitism, but they overwinter in Bermuda, Bermuda or Bahamas. Anyway, persons found in these Kennebec Plains one late May, just a few years ago. So that was really a bird that was quite lost, but it's the only record we have in the state. And the population still, it's only about 2,000. So the odds of seeing one of these birds is pretty remote outside of their normal flyway. Fieldfair is a European relative of the Robin. We have one record of violet-green swallow. It looks a whole not like a tree swallow, doesn't it, but you'll notice the white goes up on the side of the rump. And we have one record for violet-green swallow, fairly recently in the state. This is a bird that caught my fancy because I was in school in Baltimore at the time when I heard about it. We were tempted to try to come up and see this bird. It was found in Bitterford Pool and it was identified as a street flycatcher at that time, what was called a sulfur-bellied flycatcher, which is a non-migratory bird found in Arizona. But subsequent analysis indicated that this was actually a variegated flycatcher, which is even more amazing. It's found in South America. And the ones at the extreme south of the range down in Argentina actually do migrate north toward the Austro-winter. And that would have been perhaps explaining one of these things got a little exuberant and ended up at Bitterford Pool. So, fantastic bird. And obviously, not too many records of these guys. Hey, Harold, I'm wondering if we could pause really quick. The audio issue is still happening a little bit. So, I'm going to try turning off your video for a little bit to see if that may be freezed things up. Is that okay? So, we can still see the screen. Sure. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That's fine. All right. We shall give it a try. Go ahead. So, Crested Caracara found just a few springs ago in the Waterville area. This is a terrestrial falcon. Mostly found, well, it's found very broadly through the tropics, but Texas is a place to see them. But 511 in Maine is pretty amazing. The extreme bills, of course, are coastal birds. I think, well, where was this seen? Maybe Scarborough Marsh? No, it was seen in Doverflexcroft. So, it was in a pond in Doverflexcroft. Was it last summer or the summer before last? Pretty amazing. And then red-footed falcon. This is an African bird. And one showed up here in Maine some years ago. It was fantastic. Obviously, very much challenged as far as directions were concerned. And then a red-billed tropic bird, one has been seen off the, is looking for a mate for the last 10 or 15 years off the coast of Maine, Matenicus Rock, Seal Rock. And I guess it was there in the summer. It was obviously a lot less traffic going out to look for it in these COVID days. A slated-billed ball found at the Augusta dump, Hatchel dump, the bird right here, found by Lewis Brevere. And it's the only record, I think, of slated-billed ball in the state. It's an Asian bird, wandering tatler, just one record. A fantastically beautiful bird. And European golden plover, you can figure out where that's from as well. And then perhaps the most famous rarity that we've had is the Greater Black Hawk, which was seen two Augusta go in Prowt's neck, and then spent much of the early part of the winter, in late fall and early winter, down Portland. So a lot of people from all over the country got to see this rare from the Prowt's. And Corn Creek is a rail that was found on Monhegan by Doug, and rails are amazing. They have these little short wings, but yet they are able to fly long distances. This is a European bird, and rails are well known for getting to islands. So there are lots of island species of rails. But this Corn Creek was fantastic. And then a couple of hummingbirds you never know. This is a western hummingbird, the Kaliopee very small. And then even jazzer is this Mexican violet ear, showed up once, and it's of course, well to our south, normally out of the country. And then recently, Clark's Grieve showed up on Togos Pond in Augusta, and lots and lots of birders got to see Clark's Grieve in Augusta. Much to the dismay of many of the Togos residents who got tired of people riding along the road looking for the Clark's Grieve, but some of them were delighted to entertain birders. So I think most people that tried to see it got a chance to see the Clark's Grieve. But there was one prior record of the coast, of the mid coast somewhere. So let's talk about birds that one would not imagine should be here. So these are birds that were introduced by humans. And one of them is, of course, our rock pigeon. And if we take a look at the distribution of rock pigeons in the wild, this is where they are found. So these are birds that are feral. They are wild birds. And my wife and I had a chance to visit the north part of Scotland here where there are feral rock doves. And it was amazing because she couldn't get within 200 meters of them. But they are easily domesticated. And now they've been introduced. They were introduced into North America in the 17th century. So soon after colonization, they brought pigeons. And of course, they're used for food. And this is a distribution of pigeons in North America now. A pretty good introduction. So even now, 200 years ago, we would have pigeons in me. But Starlings, a different story. Starlings were introduced into North America in Central Park in over a period of 1886, 1888, something like that. A man named Eugene who was an ex-patriot Brit. He was living right in Upper Manhattan. And he decided that he wanted to introduce all the birds that were mentioned in Shakespeare at the Central Park. And this was his first project. So he introduced 100 Starlings into Central Park. And they took off. And my goodness, this is where Starlings are found normally. But look what Starlings have done now from that introduction in New York City. They've spread all throughout North America. And not without significant effects. So if we take a look at the Starling, its bill is remarkable. It's very strong. It's pointed. Yet it's able to crush. So they're able to catch insects and other small vertebrates even. They're able to take fruits. And they are a real hassle for lots of fruit growers. And they also are cavity nesters. So they compete with woodpeckers and chickadees and nut hatches and bluebirds for nesting sites. And the final one we'll talk about that was introduced from away was House Sparrow. And here you can see one who's decided to make his home in a tree swallow box. But House Sparrow is an unusual species because they're the only species, only species that I'm aware of, that evolved entirely with humans. So they're never found away from human habitation. They arose in the Middle East, in this part of Iraq. They were thought to have arisen originally. But now they spread naturally all throughout Europe and Asia and in parts of Africa. But because they've been introduced so widely and they can always find human habitation, they've done really well all around the world. So if we take a look in North America, I should tell you, 100 birds were purchased for 200 bucks by a man named Nicholas Pike in 1871, something like that. They introduced them into Brooklyn and there were two more introductions. One was in San Francisco in the late 1870s and another in Salt Lake City about the same time. And those three introductions resulted in this. Oh, they have spread pretty widely. So House Sparrow is again always associated with humans. So agricultural habitats and city habitats are places to see them and you're not going to find them in the middle of Baxter State Park. But they are cavity nesters as well. And so they do compete with other cavity nesting birds like bluebirds. And in fact what you can do is you can make your opening to a tree swallow or bluebird box a little bit smaller than this one. So let's talk about some of the information that we have on bird abundance in the state of the last 200 years. John James Audubon came to visit us. He came here in 1832 with his son and several other people and they spent a month in Denny'sville just west of Copswood Bay in Washington County. I think that's where they were in Denny'sville at the Lincoln establishment. And then they were heading on up to Labrador on a trip later in 1832. So we have some information from Audubon. This was a book published in 1901 by Ora Knight. So it was the first ornithology of the birds of Maine. And then that was followed up in 1951 by Ralph Palmer. So a fish, a wildlife biologist. And we also have the Christmas bird count. So that's a great way to get information on the abundance of birds and in fact now the world started in 1900. So we have quite a lot of data on bird abundance from the North American breeding bird survey. So for breeding birds this was started in 1966 and continues until today. So we'll be talking a lot about that information today. One of the first state atlases of breeding birds was in fact done in Maine. It was done as you can see over six-year period. And it was a bare bones undertaking and you'll see a couple of maps from them before we're done today. We have a current atlas project going on. So we've just finished the third year, two more years to go. And this is a much more substantive atlas. Lots and lots of volunteers and lots of great technology to help with mapping and the analysis. And then Peter Hickory, who passed away a few years ago, was working on the birds of Maine sort of an update. Well it was a new birds of Maine. The last one would be published in 1951 by Ralph Palmer, right? Anyway Peter passed away before completion but his wife Barbara and Scott Weidensall have edited the book and three other authors have helped as well. And it's going to be released on the number third. It's published by Princeton University Press and I just got I ordered a pre-publication copy or I ordered a copy in advance and I just got an email today that mine was shipped today so I'll be getting it soon. But anyway, everyone in Maine interested in reading the copy of Peter's fantastic book. Let's talk about using breeding birds survey. Let's talk about some birds in Maine that are doing okay. And when you see these curves the dark curve here represents the average of this particular analysis. And this is the lower and the upper confidence limit. So these times of political polling we hear about this person has a 67% of the votes plus or minus 3%. So this is the plus or minus 3%. So this is the in all likelihood the actual numbers fall somewhere between here and here. 95% chance the numbers are between here and here with the highest chance being here. So you get the idea. If the curves are going up it's good. If they're going down it's bad. So breeding bird and hummingbirds actually started maybe a little bit of an increase. That's good. We like that. Red-eyed virios there's some going up and down a little bit but we're holding our own. That's always good to see. And you can see these numbers are numbers per breeding bird survey route. So they're 50 stops along a 24 and a half mile area stretch of the road. So people are seeing about one per stop. That's pretty good. Blue jays showing some up and down but pretty stable overall. And of course our state bird chicken eat doing fine. And there's anything going on with other birds. They may be showing a little bit of an increase. So that's good. And that's true for the northern birds. So others we would have certainly slides. It would be just too many. But you will know most of these birds anyway. The black and green showing a pretty much equally green level as well. Herring dolls. We know from Ora Knight's book published in 2001 that herring dolls were actually pretty uncommon in Maine. They were only in spring and fall along most of the coast. Numbers were never really very high. And I think a lot of their abundance has to do with humans. Without the fact that they can easily find food at transfer stations and open dumps and parking lots and whatever. So herring dolls are a lot more common now than they were 100, 120 years ago. When warmlers bird were not found in Maine 50 years ago even have now pushed into Maine and are becoming breeders. So we can see that they pushed up north of Portland now up in the Brunswick area and confirm breeding down in southern Maine. So it's a bird that's pushed up perhaps just because of global warming. Perhaps their population is increasing and being forced to move elsewhere. But anyway it's a story of birds that are increasing in Maine. We like that. Here's the House Finch. The House Finch was a relatively recent arrival in Maine. About 1979 the first House Finches were found in Maine. Let's take a look at the map of these birds. You can see that there's an eastern population and there's an eastern population. Well guess how the eastern population got here. House Finches were often captured by pet store owners and carried east and sold as Hollywood Finches. And they're fairly colorful as you know and they sang readily in captivity. And there was a good trade of them going on in New York City particularly. And one of the owners, a pet shop owners, got wind that the Fisher Wildlife Service was about to bust them. And so he let all of his House Finches go from New York City in 1939. And since then all of this population here has resulted from that single introduction. So you can see we've almost gotten back to the original here. But they're pretty rapidly in Maine and you can see what they've done. They increased rapidly once they got introduced. And then there was this huge crash. And this crash was caused by a disease called mycoplasmosis. It was a conjunctivitis and it caused a crash of the population. And they frankly have never recovered. So their numbers are relatively modest compared to what they were in the mid to early 1890s. And they've had an effect on purple Finches. Because purple Finches sort of had the Finch niche to themselves before House Finches got here. And House Finches which mostly like human altered habitats have forced purple Finches away out to more forested areas. So it's a male purple Finch. And you can see their populations have fallen which is in part, but not entirely, due to the introduction of House Finches. Bluebirds in part because of aggressive building of blue bird trails, bluebirds have done reasonably well in Maine. Their numbers were pretty low. We're worried about the house sparrows competing with them. But again, we know making the hole small enough will keep the house sparrows away. So bluebirds, that's a good sign. Titmice relatively rare in Maine not in all in Maine in 1950, relatively rare through the 1990s. But they have pushed north as well. Again, perhaps because of global climate change. But you can see the population has done it. And if we take a look at the breeding bird atlas from 1978 to 83, I told you it was pretty bare bones. This is done on mimeograph paper I think. But you can see there are relatively few records throughout the state of Tempted Titmice. Let's take a look from the recent breeding bird atlas. And you can see that they have pushed up north of Scoutian well north. And there have been populations there's been at least some sightings in extreme down east Maine as well. So there's an increasing bird in Maine. Harry Woodpeckers a resident bird. But for reasons I don't really understand they're increasing. But that's great. And then another one of these southerly birds that's pushing northward so what we have is an expansion north and you can see that's pretty obvious there. Particularly if we look at the upper bound. But even here you can see that there's been an increase in breeding of Carolina rins in the state. Turkey Vultures virtually occurred 40 years ago in the state. And they're just in 1979, 8 to 83, just a few records only a few confirmed breeding records. Those are the dark boxes there. But take a look at them now. Oh my goodness they're all way up in the northern heuristic county. So another species that has expanded aggressively into Maine. Cardinals Central Maine never heard Cardinals singing when we first moved here in 1990. This is the many grown up in North Carolina. But now their songs are a constant part of the summer chorus. So they've increased prairie warblers. Not very common in Maine 50 years ago and now they've increased pretty successfully. I guess I don't have the map of them. And then Red Valley Woodpeckers is another great example of a southerly species pushing north. Again perhaps in part because of the milleration of the climate, perhaps because of increased population in the south. But at any rate they've pushed into the central part of the state anyway. And I think we'll continue to push northward through time. So lots of increases in birds in Maine. Good news. Then there are success stories that we really want to celebrate. One of them first came in large part because of the work of this manor Rachel Carson who wrote in 1962 Silent Spring. And she alerted the world to the fact that bird populations were decreasing drastically. Particularly birds that were feeding on fish or higher predators. And it was because of DDT. DDT a great insecticide used right after World War II. Particularly bio magnifies in the food chain. And it interferes with calcium metabolism of birds. So the female birds were laying eggs that were so weak that they got crushed when the female would try to incubate them. So by 1960 or so the Pelican state, Louisiana, had no Pelicans at all. And upright bald eagles and peregrine falcons crashed. And since then we cleaned up the DDT and instituted conservation programs. And bald eagles have fantastically rebounded. So what a great success story that is. Sad that they crashed but at least they recovered. And the same thing is true of ospreys. So we don't have a pair of falcons to make sense of the pattern because they're relatively rare. Now we want to talk about some birds that are caused for concern. And I'm breaking this up into several categories. But the first are the aerial insectivores. People come up to me a lot and they say, you know, I used to have bird swallows or I used to have cat birds or whatever in my yard. What's going on? And my answer often was, well birds come and go in a particular place. Conservation biologists like to talk about winking. So you can imagine that you have a habitat, we'll just draw a circle around it. If your eyes open and the birds are there but if you close this then they're gone. But it may open again. So birds come and go. But when birds disappear over large areas then you start to worry about things. And so sometimes when I was saying, well I think it's just a local effect. It in fact was not such a local effect. And one of those cases was certainly with barn swallows which we can see here. Let's take a look. Well, we'll start with purple martins. We'll come and talk about barn swallows in just a moment. But purple martins are admittedly near the northern part of their range here in Maine. But again, nesting in cavities and no purple martin nest in anything other than human-provided habitat nowadays. It's pretty amazing. But they are often very abundant. There you can see they're obviously colonials. They can have lots in a single place. Look what's happened in Maine. Just a radical crash. And we can take a look at the data from the old Greenbird Atlas. And you can see that there's sort of this line that goes from southwest to northeast. And I remember my wife and I in the 1990s found ourselves up in this part of northern Washington County in Princeton. There's a huge colony of purple martins there. Well, they're not there anymore. This is the current breeding distribution of purple martins in the state. And you can see that we've lost all of the ones up here. And the ones that are still left are relatively meager, relatively few. So that's a problem. What do the purple martins eat? Flying insects. And we believe that flying insect abundance is greatly diminishing. But the aerial insects, the ones that the martins and the swallows and the swifts and the night jars eat seem to be diminishing particularly quickly. So here's another. Chimneys. Crashed. Eastern Kingbird. This is pretty depressing. Sorry, but we need to see the data. Eastern Woodpewee. Least flycatcher. I'm not cherry picking. We're looking at the most abundant ones. Eastern Phoebe. And you say, oh, well, maybe here's something that's a bit... Well, I don't think so. And the reason is that as you know, Eastern Phoebe's are our earliest flycatcher to come back. They sometimes come back in early May, early March, rather. And they're about to last to leave. So you can still see Phoebe's right now. And the reason they can do that even when they're not insects flying around is that they are a little more varied in their diet, that they eat fruits. So they don't fly insects and they can eat fruits. And so they're able to do a little better than their related species that are strict aerial insectivores. Tree swallows. Boom. Bank swallows. And here's the barn swallow. In the 1978 to 83 breeding bird was where I think the third most common bird recorded on the atlases for breeding. Now they're not even in the top 10. It's something like the 28th most common species recorded breeding in the state. And the same thing is true of tree swallows. They were in the top 10 in the early atlas and they are well down in the middle of the pack in the current atlas. So a different way of looking at a different source of information that shows the same pattern. Whipper whales. So we're looking at the night jars decline pretty drastically. Night hawks. Kestrels. I know Kestrels aren't aerial insectivores but there's other species that's showing a relatively drastic decline. Flickers are showing a decline. Flickers are largely ant eaters feeding on the ground and perhaps ant abundance is going down. I just don't know what the reason for this decline is. And before we started Bert was asking about evening gross speaks. And I know a lot of folks that have been seeing evening gross speaks lately. They are certainly an eating madness species. And we shouldn't hasten to add that they're not native to Eastern North America. That they are a western species that was introduced into the east because of the introduction particularly of their favorite food which is boxelder. Introduced into the east and not provided food for some of the food for evening gross speaks. But you can see that they had a really, really good time in the late 1960s. And you know what was going on here? It was a gypsy worm epidemic. And so the evening gross speaks switched to gypsy worms and their populations skyrocketed. And then of course they crashed because the gypsy worm abundance went way down. And they really never recovered. But I think we are sort of misled by the fact that they for a brief time at least 30, 40 years ago they were really abundant. But now they are relatively uncommon. And I'm not quite sure what to make of them except to know that they wander a lot. And that I'm always glad when I see or hear some of them. Then we got the neotropical migrants, birds that nest in North America and winter in the tropics. And a biologist, I think he was at Princeton at the time, but now he's at Duke. He wrote a book where have all the birds gone? And he was just noticing that compared to his memory of the abundance of warblers when he was growing up that warblers are just not as common now. This was 1989. And we know that that is a real problem. And using the breeding bird survey data, we know that a lot of these neotropic migrants are climbing. So yellow throats, wood thrushes, furries, white throats, sparrows, red starts, chestnut-sided warblers, yellow warblers. And of course the reason for these declines is complex because we really have three things to worry about, don't we? We have to worry about the breeding grounds where we are. We have to worry what's going on in the wintery grounds where lots of deforestation may be occurring. And we have to worry about what's going on along the migratory routes. So there are all sorts of perils for these birds, but the overall effect is that they are declining. Scarotic tannagers declining. And the last group of birds that we'll mention are the grassland birds. This is actually a picture of Canovac Plains and what we can see at Canovac Plains is bobble lakes, but not as many as we used to. They're showing a pretty drastic decline. Savannah sparrows as well. And of course we have grasshopper sparrows at a few places in Maine, but their numbers aren't big enough that we can really get statistically valid information on their abundance. So off they go. So we'll go to this nice fellow here while I make a few closing comments. So what we've seen is that as you would expect when you've got 450 species, some birds are going to be increasing, some are decreasing, some are holding the same. And what's good for one bird may be bad for another. Clear cutting is really bad for winter rains and swans and thrushes and Tennessee but it's good for morning warmers and leek and sparrows. But there are human effects that we're having that are obviously causing really horrible things to happen to our birds. And so what I've done is to talk about some of the happy news and end it with some of the bad news because that's what we need to keep thinking about is that the birds have wonderful voices. We can't speak for ourselves so we do that for them. So thank you so much and I'll be glad to take some questions. Thank you, Herb. I'm going to turn your video back on. And if Nancy you want to turn your video back on as well. We could take some questions and the way the questions work well here is that if you see down below everybody on the lower panel there is a box that says Q&A if you could type your questions into there instead of the chat that's a much better easier for us to not lose track of the questions. And Bert and Nancy do you want me to facilitate the questions or you're on mute the naps. So Herb a question from Joan. She and we've heard this is a question we get a lot sometimes. I have a male cardinal bashing himself into my window all summer and he's still doing it. Why? It's hormones. So what the bird is doing is defending his territory against himself. So he sees his reflection and he thinks it's another intruding bird. But the cardinals will maintain a territory that want another male and pinging on their territory. So I think that's what's going on. Yep. Hormones. I have a question from Stan here. What is predating tree swallow young in nest snakes? I don't know actually. I'm sure that snakes maybe one source. I don't know what else. Have you had evidence of predation Stan in your tree swallow on nestlings? Not sure. And do you want to talk a little bit about what happens Go ahead. One of the big advantages of being a cavity nester is that relatively few predators can get in there and one of the neat patterns that we see is that birds that nest in cavities have much higher birds that don't. For instance, most warblers have laid four eggs but the planetary warbler which lays eggs in a nest cavity will lay six eggs. So it's a sure bet that they're going to make it. So they invest a little bit more. So I think the chances of predation are greatly diminished if you're in a nest cavity or nest box. Stan says yes, he has two nest boxes with young that were pecked to death. He said gruesome. Could it be house sparrows? That's house sparrows. Yeah, so you need to open smaller in your box. I had that happen with bluebirds in our yard as well. So I had to go to war against the house sparrows. And if I may, I would recommend a site from Cornell called nest watch. You can go in there and they will give you plans for various species, you know, particular hole size, information like which direction the box should be facing, how high off the ground, things like that, that can be really make the difference between getting the birds you want into the nest boxes. So it's just go to nest watch from Cornell. Question here from Diane. What a nice question this is. She's new to Maine. Is it good that she has white-throated sparrows? Yes, it's wonderful that you have white-throated sparrows. Yeah, this is a good time to see them in migration. So, but I think they're wonderful. Poor Sam Peabody song is just one of the great sounds of Maine of the Maine woods. Great. We have another question from Diane. It's another Diane from Waterville. She said, since August, she has had Cardinals twice have their young on my property. I have observed several now with non-red beaks and assume these were the fledglings, but also don't seem to see any adults with red beaks. So maybe you want to talk about different plumage differences in Cardinals. Yeah, so the red beaks of a is actually to plant material to carotenoids. So they get that food from the carotenoids that are in the seeds that they eat. So if a male has a particularly bright orange bill, it's because he's a good forager. He can find food that's rich in the carotenoids. So you can have adults that have very dull bills, but it's an advertisement that they're not a very good forager. And so they were tended to be males. So it's what in biology, we call that an honest signal. You can't fake it. If you're a bad forager, you're not going to have a bright bill. So the young birds are typically always going to have that dull bill because they're not very good at foraging and haven't had time to really build up the carotenoid levels. That's fascinating. And despite what the St. Louis Cardinals will tell you, you'll never see one with a yellow bill. So Thomas Exactly. Thomas Hamilton asks, is there data to support the suggestion that flying insect populations have decreased? Oh, yeah, there's an abundance of data actually. There's a I'm not going to be able to remember exactly when, but about four or five weeks, four or five months ago, there was a very nice article in the New York Times magazine, Sunday magazine on insect abundance. And so I suspect you can Google that pretty easily, but I would check that out as a good introduction. There are also a number of scientific papers that have been published lately. And if you want to email me, I'd be glad to give you some citations. That will be maybe put that in the chat. Your voice broke up as you were saying that. So maybe you type that out in the chat. That would be that would be helpful for everyone. While you're doing that, a question from Margie or Margie, are rose-breasted growth speaks increasing or decreasing? I'll tell you, I don't know. I'd be surprised if they're doing anything but keeping steady. I haven't heard of even worried about them, but on the other hand, I haven't found them particularly abundant just to my wondering around. And another question from Joan, have Robbins gotten bigger in size over the years? Hmm. Not to my knowledge. We do have several different groups of Robbins that come to mind. There's some birds that breed in Newfoundland that are a little darker in size than the ones that we normally see. So there could be these subspecific differences. I'm not aware of them, but it may be enough of a difference to cause you to say, well, these birds are particularly big. And of course, Robbins can puff up like most birds. So if it's a cool day, they'll appear larger than they were on a really warm day. So if folks have additional questions, please put them in the Q&A box. There's one in the chat. We'll take those two from Fenwick. Is there a recent trend for Robbins wintering over in Maine? That's a good question. A good source of would be look at the Christmas bird count data. And I haven't done that. Looking at the Christmas bird count data, it's a little more laborious than looking at the breeding bird survey data. They have done a lot of analyses for you already. But my own impression is that they're highly variable as to whether they over wintering or not. And in large part, it's how the fruit crop is. Because the thing about birds is that they are awfully tough. They can tolerate very, very cold temperatures as long as they can find food. For instance, common red poles, they can over winter at 70 degrees north. As long as there's enough birch seed available for them to feed on. If there's not a whole lot of birch seed, then they leave and we get to see them in those winters. The same thing I think is probably true with Robbins. And with berries and mountain ash and so forth, they're perfectly happy to stick around the credible fruits and so forth. But when those fruit abundances are low, then they're forced to leave. And that in fruit abundance is notoriously variable from season to season. So it's a, there's no, there's no clear pattern, I would say, of the increase or decrease. Great. And I didn't realize that. I didn't realize that. I didn't realize that. I didn't realize that. I didn't realize that. I didn't realize that. I didn't realize that. Great. And I did want to mention a comment from Cynthia in the chat here to encourage birds in your yard, see books from Doug Ptolemy on the right plantings. A quick shout out because I, because they pay my bills to Maine Audubon's bringing nature home program, which we took the name from Doug Ptolemy's books about planting native plants. Check out our website about which plants might work in your yard and we also sell plants throughout the year, although we've just ceased for the year. So good comment from Cynthia. Question from Lou King King. Speaking of Robins, I really believe that Robins are different in Maine than upstate New York where I often live. It seems to me that the ones here are less saturated in color and more lurky in behavior. Do you think that's true or could be true? It could be true. I have no, no idea. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not aware. Yeah. So we got a couple more questions here. From Bob. What drives snowy owls in Maine? Yeah. So those birds that we call the eruptive birds. So they're birds that nest at high latitude. And if there's sufficient food available for them, they will stay at high latitude during the winter. So snowy owls are feeding on lemmings and voles, small mammals like that. And we know that they, those go through population booms and busts. And they will stay around. And again, so as they can have sufficient food, then they will scoff at the cold weather. But when those vol populations or other small road of populations go down and they're forced to leave. So they end up in places like Logan airport, where they feel rats. So that's one of the better places to find snowy owls in the Northeast. It's Logan airport. And a similar question from Eleanor. How do golden crown kinglets find enough food to live through a Maine winter? Ah, with great difficulty. I'm sure. We realized that golden crown kinglets are half the size of a chickadee. And the smaller you are, the more difficult it is to maintain a constant body temperature because you have a really large surface area. And to lose heat and a very small body to. So also the golden crown kinglets are, are entirely carnivorous. So they're not feeding on seeds. They're feeding on frozen insects. So it's just remarkable to me that they're able to do it. I don't know how they do it, but obviously they do. And of course their cousins, the Ruby crown king, let's say to say, I'm out of here. I'm going to go down to North Carolina for the winter. So we have, it's 758. If you have final questions, please get them in now. And we still should end on time. And I see a couple more coming in. We've had the impression that American Robins I see in the winter in Western Maine are perhaps the ones from Newfoundland. Is that so? Yeah, the Newfoundland, they can be all over the state, but they're really, really dark, really dark on the back. Right. From, from Glenn. How common is red cross bill breeding in Southern Maine? They have been around the state. They have been around this late fall. Sorry. They've been around this late summer fall in the white pines. Yeah. So there are some, there are some breeding records for this fall for red cross bill in Oxford County. And another one of these ending manic species that they wander around looking for, for pine cone crops. And if they find a good crop, then they will just stop right there and they'll breed. So it's pretty amazing. I, one of the most amazing sites that I had in my burning career was being in Northern Vermont in late January, when the temperature was, was minus 35 degrees. And white wing cross bills were nesting. It was just amazing. There was just so, so much in the way of. The plant. So once again, food so important to birds, you get them enough food and they could do most anything. And I have to say, I was in Shirley Mills main up near Greenville this January and saw white, white wing cross bills doing the same thing. Full display singing everywhere. Yeah. It was, it was, it was nice actually to be pulled out of the winter. Okay. I think we'll we'll end on this. question from an anonymous mystery attendee. On the topic of declining populations, are there any birds that you know around here that are likely going to face local extinction? Well yeah, so the most susceptible are those that are relatively rare and sometimes for birds that are rare they often are at the edge of their range and so for them to weekend it out it's not unusual. So I can't think of any bird species. Maybe big nails thrush, maybe that would be, because there are all that many, but maybe that would be one that would be susceptible to extinction in Maine and maybe, I mean this sort of becomes ridiculous after a while, but you can also talk about American pippets and they only nest on top of Catan, right, so on the table lands, but they would be susceptible too, but they're doing great. I mean continent-wide, they're very common, particularly out in the mountains in the West, so birds that are on the margin, those are the ones I think that are really more likely to go locally extinct. Great, well thank you. We're right on time. I don't, Bert and Nancy, if you want to say perhaps some closing words and we'll turn it to you. Make sure you take your mute off, there you go. Can you hear me? Yep, gotcha. Thanks again very much for your talk. I'm sorry there was a little bit of electronic interference, but hopefully people got the gist of it, and it was excellent. Thank you very much for joining us tonight. Thank you so much. Yeah, it was my pleasure. Thanks, thanks all of you, all of you for coming. It was fantastic. Take care everybody, have a great night. Bye all.