 Good morning, everyone out there. Nick Lund here, outreach and network manager from Maine Audubon. Welcome to morning two, two of two for the second annual 2020 rangerly birding festival. That's a lot of twos today. It's the second morning of two for the 2020 rangerly birding festival, the second ever. We're so glad to have you back or to have you join us for the first sign if this is the first morning. I want to thank again yesterday's excellent presentations from Bill Kitchcock's and Pete McKinley and from Kevin Sinnet and the Loon Cruise crew who put together thanks to Maine Mountain Media an incredible virtual Loon Cruise that was really great. So thanks to those and for those who didn't hear me just a minute ago we are working on posting those online as well as the content today so folks can watch it again and again if they want to or if they weren't able to join watch it for the first time. So thank you. So again this is the rangerly birding festival. We had hoped to do the second annual festival in person obviously but the world conspired against us. So thank you for joining with us as we pivot to this virtual festival which I think has been a lot of fun but of course I have to say it's no substitute for the real thing. So I hope everyone out there who is inspired by these talks and who wants to visit the ranger area and see all these birds in person please stay tuned for information about the actual third annual rangerly birding festival this time sometime next year because we love to see all your faces and actually go bird together in person. So so stay tuned there. Let's just cover and quick recap of the morning the agenda for Thursday the fourth is out the window we did that already. Today this morning on the Friday the fifth in a few minutes I'm going to get started on a presentation called State of the Birds which talks about the reasons why various bird populations in Maine have fluctuated over the years. At 10 a.m. photographer Nick Ledley from touchthewildphotos.com and who has a storefront there and rangerly expert wildlife photographer is going to come on and give a presentation about wildlife photography 101 which is great. And then following that at 11 a.m. is our keynote speech from professor Brian Olson of the University of Maine. He's a very entertaining smart fun guy and he's going to be doing a presentation about lumps and splits species and field guides. It's going to be really fun. So stay tuned all morning you can come in and out as you need to and this is like I said being recorded so there'll be opportunities to catch up later. So that's a schedule and I'm going to turn it over to David Miller from Ranger Lakes Heritage Trust to thank some folks. Thanks so much Nick. First of all what a great day yesterday inspirational and it was amazing to begin to understand more deeply the incredible biodiversity and birds we have in Maine's western mountains. So I want to join Nick with inviting all of you to come come up in person and experience rangerly in the region for yourself. I'd like to just take a minute to thank first my colleagues in Maine Audubon. This would not be the way it is without them so thank you so much to Nick, Doug, Laura and the whole organization. We have support from the Maine Office of Tourism for this year and probably next year's festival as well as a Betterment Fund. I want to thank them and all of our partners that we work with through the year to make rangerly a birding destination. And let me just take a few seconds to kind of back up now and set some context set the stage for today. So both Ranger Lakes Heritage Trust, my organization and Maine Audubon are conservation organizations and we would not have the bird life, the wildlife we have without the many years of efforts by the part of hundreds of thousands, millions of people to conserve the beautiful nation and world country we have. And I want to encourage all of us to continue supporting both your local land trust who conserves land right near you and your local Maine Audubon chapter. Without this kind of work going on in perpetuity we risk losing what we love more than anything. I spent just a couple minutes this morning looking into the derivation of the word conserve which I often do. And it is interesting. Usually it comes down to from Latin originally to save to preserve together to work together to preserve something. But if you go deeper into the roots the the serve that from sir which is the Indo-European the original if there's a coming straight from some of the original human languages it means to keep watch. And it is interesting to think about bird watching. Certainly we're out there birding bird watching looking at birds. We're actually also keeping watch over something that we love so much. And the reason we love it is we're part of it. And in reality we share the same cellulose the same cells that all these living creatures we see around us have. So it's not something separate from us. We're protecting ourselves when we protect the natural world and we are we share the same fate. So thank you again for all of your work. I know many of you probably all of you work hard to take care of the wonderful world we have the natural world. Thank you for that. And yes please look to support your local conservation groups land trust your local main at Ottoman chapter and looking forward to a great morning. So thank you very much and Nick back to you. Okay thank you David. Let's get going shall we nine oh man nine I gotta go. So hopefully I'm going to go through this presentation quickly. We'll leave some time for questions and then and then we'll rock and roll. State of the birds decades of change. This is a presentation originally developed by my much smarter and handsomer colleague Doug Hitchcox. I sort of adapted it to my own ends. So I want to thank him for putting together a lot of the ideas at the beginning and a lot of the photos probably too. So what are we talking about today? Well I got to do this quickly first. This is a I'm contractually obligated to say tell you that main Audubon is the largest and oldest wildlife conservation in the state of Maine. We've been around since 1843 if you can believe that. We've got 10,000 members around the state 2000 volunteers. We got seven chapters. The closest to range Lee is the western western Maine chapter based out of Farmington. Eight wildlife sanctuaries including Boarstone Mountain up in the range Lee area. We connect people to wildlife is what we do in Maine. So we have robust education programs. We teach thousands of kids about nature and wildlife. We have conservation programs. We have scientists out on the ground monitoring populations of animals and then advocacy program to bring what we found from our scientists to Augusta to try to tell those people the right way to protect me. So if you're not part of our world already please join us. Decades of change. Okay so this presentation we're talking about bird populations in Maine and why they fluctuated for various reasons over the years. There are quite a few reasons. Some are mysterious. Some are natural variations in populations and many of them are have changed because of human one way or another. So we're going to talk about some of the varieties and some of the reasons that some bird populations are changing today. But we should start with by talking about what's a range right? Why do birds have different ranges? Will birds have different ranges because they like different things. They have different habitats. They eat different things and so over the years birds have developed different areas to live based on those needs. We'll use here two similar species. These are two warblers. On the left is the yellow warbler and the yellow romped warbler on the right. They're both you know pretty closely related in the scheme of things but they've because of you know slight divergences in their habitat preferences and their food they've developed very different ranges as you can see from the maps up above. So just so we are clear the red is their summer habitat for these birds. The yellow is sort of migratory transition habitat. The blue is where they spend their winters and as you can see for example the yellow romped warbler they their blue area is much higher far further north than the yellow warbler. The yellow warbler can spend has learned to be able to tolerate colder temperatures, learn to eat some fruit and so consequently has been able to spend some some time of their winter in areas where there aren't a lot of insects to eat. The yellow warbler on the other hand just eats insects and so it can't spend any time in a place where there aren't insects and so in the winter it needs to get somewhere warm where there's bugs to eat. In the summer they can come north and so ranges change based on the species. It's not just these warblers but here's a range of another lovely bird common loon. Common loon they have evolved to nest on freshwater lakes. The trouble with a freshwater lake and I should say this map is sort of the inverse of the last one. The blue is the summer habitat and the red is the winter habitat. I didn't make these maps but that is kind of confusing. So in the winter they are out on the ocean and in the summer they're inland. You know the trouble lakes are a great place to nest they're calm there's lots of fish there but the trouble is you can't spend the winter on the lake if you're a bird because it's frozen solid right so loons have evolved to find open water in the winter and that means the ocean for them. So that's what ranges mean. Let's talk about a couple ranges that have that change flexually or bird populations that have changed naturally sorry. So first of all we should say that lots of birds ranges have changed in the past 18,000 years because 18,000 years ago Maine was covered entirely by ice. I don't know what was there before maybe some some penguins I don't know but there certainly wasn't much and so as the ice has receded from the previous ice age in the past 18,000 years almost all bird species have moved up and changed their range to to become into Maine in that time. So here's one of them. This is a beautiful bird one that you could possibly see it range the sort of an elusive denizen of the northern forest this is an eastern northern sorry evening gross speak I've had one cup of coffee which is not enough an evening gross speak very beautiful finch bird with a big bill that can crush seeds and just beautiful colors. This is a bird that as you'll see sort of disappeared recently so this is a sightings map for evening gross speak in Maine starting on the left at 1960 and you can see that sightings sort of burst up in the 70s and 80s people were seeing these birds much more frequently and then early 90s their populations crashed absolutely crashed and it was a real mystery what was going on people didn't know what the reason was for the sudden decline in this beautiful bird and there were sort of some some of the similar species facing a similar declines that up on the top left is a female evening gross speak on the top right is a bay breasted warbler down here is a Cape May warbler on the left and then a Tennessee warbler in the flowers each of these birds was experiencing declines and people didn't really know why. So here until they discovered a link between this insect and those birds so like I said sort of with the yellow warbler birds eat insects a lot of these birds especially migratory birds eat insects and need insects to feed their babies insects are a major part of this the summer diet of almost all birds because their caterpillars especially are so filled with protein that they're great for raising baby birds and so insects are really important to lots of birds and scientists were beginning to understand that this insect called the spruce budworm was a major diet major important source of food for evening gross speaks and some of those migratory warblers Easter spruce budworm is considered a pest like certain other insects they have these cyclical patterns where they sort of have big outbreaks in the forest every 30 or so years and they can be fairly devastating to a spruce forest they they devour leaves and they can kill a lot of timber but they are extremely important to spruce budworms as we're learning and outbreaks of these insects track very closely with the population heights of these native birds so right here we can see a population map over just the past between 14 and 18 of Bay breasted warbler one of those warblers I showed you before and so what we are seeing now is sort of an emerging outbreak over the past couple years of spruce budworms and so the question is to sort of prove the link between the two will the populations of the birds rise along with the populations of the budworms and the answer is a resounding yes so you can see here the purple line is the most recent you can see it gets higher and higher and higher over recent years as they are recovering as more insects run the landscape this is a similar chart for Tennessee warbler you can see it similarly peaks high and for Kate May warbler again the purple is at the top so that was sort of a natural mystery going on and what we determined is that certain populations of these birds even grow speaks and some of these migratory warblers naturally fluctuate along with populations of their favorite food source these spruce budworms and so this is important discoveries for for management like I said spruce budworms are considered a large pest of the timber industry this is a airplane in the 60s spraying DDT down to try to kill spruce budworms so the more we know about the benefits of spruce budworm the more we can plan for them and work improve our management of the insects and our management of the northern northern forest to also protect birds so that's sort of a natural fluctuation that we've discovered another natural fluctuation this is sort of cheating is this very cool bird the cattle egret you can see down in the in the lower left that funky breeding plumage they had with this cool little colored mohawk cattle egret is a primarily a old world bird they live between europe and africa and for the longest time they didn't live in the united states at all then live in in north or south america but in the early 30s as birds are want to do occasionally a group of cattle egrets made it over the atlantic and landed in south america they just showed up one day this happens from time to time but in previous years whenever this would happen these cattle egrets didn't fare well or we don't know what happens then they they follow large herds of animals so in africa they'll they'll follow you know buffalo and and elephants and things like that when they showed up in the 30s in south america they suddenly found some big animals around they found cattle and so these cattle egret which naturally made the jump across the ocean suddenly had some suddenly felt sort of at home and since then cattle egrets have spread all over north and south america it's pretty incredible so you can see here the sort of jumps that they've made over time from 1937 they spread down into chile in south america by the 70s and then up into north america in the 60s and 70s and even there's recently the 2000s they're still very rare in main it's rare to get cattle egrets but down south they're much more common and this is sort of part of their natural range expansion facilitated by humans but still still natural so good for them so that's sort of it for the natural changes birds range is naturally we're we're honed over thousands of years and so don't change very much on their own but humans have come along and and thrown many wrenches in the system and because of our influence lots of birds ranges have changed so we're going to talk for the rest of the presentation about things that we have done to facilitate range expansion or contraction from different birds the first way that we've put our influence our thumb on the scale is by changing land use or removing habitat for certain birds like this guy one of the most beautiful birds out there this is an american kestrel beautiful little falcon not very big you know just a but a terror if you're a dragonfly or a grasshopper you do not want to see this bad boy coming at you a beautiful bird another species this is a tree swallow a beautiful aerial insectivore sort of spend their whole life on the wing not their whole life on the wing but they fly around and in patterns like that picking off aerial insects really beautiful birds and this one too this very cool blackbird called a bobble link the beautiful little yellow cat back there and a crazy song and display what all these birds have in common they are grasslands specialists right so these birds all are right at home on the grasslands and the thing about grasslands is they're not doing great in the state of Maine here are some population maps in Maine of the american kestrel you can see that they've been declining since the 70s pretty strongly that routes chart at the bottom is just to show you that the data is steady here there where it's just a sort of a control for the data that population is is steadily declining the way that a lot of bird conservationists keep track of bird populations is through these breeding bird atlases which is a comprehensive survey of breeding birds in any state Maine's breeding bird atlas is underway right now kudos to my friend Doug Hitchcox who is leading the charge from main autobahn's end for the main breeding bird atlas in conjunction with the state of Maine and other organizations ours is almost done and so we can't sort of share the data we don't have the data done yet but massachusetts recently finished theirs and so we can infer from massachusetts it's how main birds may be doing so this is the the american kestrel change map for from the massachusetts breeding bird survey the red triangle means that there was a decrease in population and you can see it's nothing but red triangles down here so this is just to show you that in a state sort of similar to Maine kestrels are also not doing very well at all similarly those other species the tree swallow and the bobble link are facing shark declines why is that because we sort of changed their habitat right there aren't nearly as many grasslands or open meadows as there used to be this is a map of farmland in the state of Maine since 1850 and you can see here that the percentage of the state in farmland used to be much much higher than it was now so farmland and grassland were great habitats for some of these birds in the 1880s about 30 percent of the entire state of Maine was farmland which is which is think about what that would mean for the landscape that's a lot of land now it's down just over five percent and so all of those all of that could have been habitat but there's good news through the efforts of main Audubon and many others we have worked to protect piping clover nests on beaches throughout the state and we're we're doing a great job kicking some butt this here is a map of piping clover nests in in blue and fledgling birds and young baby birds in red that oops over the years and you can see that from a low in the early 80s we are up over you know as of 2015 60 nests with more than 120 birds fledged this chart is way out of date we're up nearing 100 nests now on Maine's beaches after a couple record years that article blows from last year where we have record numbers of nesting piping clover nests and you know the early word is that it's another fantastic year in Maine for these birds another beach nesting bird is the least turn a very adorable little turn turns of these agile little seabirds likewise they're doing much better in the state of Maine thanks for our efforts so the lesson here is that we if we want to change our land use habits and be more aware of what we're doing the bird will bounce back another bird you may be surprised that has changed because of land use is this gorgeous little guy here this is of course a northern cardinal northern cardinals used to be very rare in Maine did you know that in the 60s and earlier there are almost no cardinals it was a big deal when you saw a card but as you can see from this chart their their numbers have exploded in Maine of course you see them everywhere now why is that it's largely due to our changing land use as humans have come up and put houses up and then planted a lot of things that are that cardinals love especially like bushes and low berry producing bushes cardinals have moved into that habitat so that's why they're so common around people and in our backyards because they love sort of the low bushes and the shrubs that we've planted for them that otherwise weren't here eastern bluebirds are another one even more recently than cardinals you can see here just even in the early 2000s bluebirds in the winter this is in the Christmas bird count were very rare but their numbers have gone up this is due again to bluebirds being able to eat berries in the winter and as humans are planting more plants that have food sources for them throughout the year they aren't they are migrating less frequently you know migrating is dangerous and it takes time and it's you know if they're like me it's pretty lazy so that if there's food then they'll just stick around so bluebirds are a recipient of that what you what you can do to help land use change as well there's a lot of things there's movements to let your lawns grow up if you can to keep some better habitat really the best thing you can do is plant native plants so I touched on it a little bit earlier but native insects are critical to the survival of birds birds eat insects and they need caterpillars to survive and a lot of caterpillars don't survive on trees that haven't been here for a very long time a lot of insects have very close relationships with specific species of plants trees and so you need those trees if you want to have the caterpillars to feed the baby birds and so what you get to do is plant native plants main autobahn just launched our awesome native plant finder at mainnativeplants.org and we have a plant sale native plant sale coming up in a few weeks all going to be online this year you'll pick them up in person but all your ordering is online stay tuned for that it's a fantastic way to make your garden look beautiful and to support native insects and native plants so check it out all right the second way that we have changed bird populations over the years is through direct interaction here's a culprit of that this what a handsome devil this is of course a wild turkey you all know that wild turkeys were extinct in Maine extirpated from Maine in the early you know 100 years ago this is through direct interaction of hunting so there was some you know loss of their habitat but a lot of just unregulated hunting led the wild turkey to be not found in Maine at all 100 years ago here is a map on the left I mentioned earlier before we were so rudely interrupted about bird atlases this is on the left the image from the previous bird atlas from the early 80s you can see that the the black dots there are the presence of wild turkeys you can see there are only a few of them and these were reintroduced birds mostly from the Adirondacks in midcoast and southern Maine but they were not widespread this was just 30 40 years ago the other the map on the right is the blue dots are wild turkey sightings recently you can see look everywhere they are coming back in large numbers they are supposed to be here they are native here and we changed our direct interaction changed our hunting practices and they have returned to where they should be actually you can see here from the Massachusetts atlas wild turkey is the number one species that has changed the most in a positive way they have grown the most more than any other species in Massachusetts and we suspect that the map will look similar to me here's another one cheers for this guy drink your coffee for this one bald eagle of course you know that bald eagles were in a terrible state in the 50s and 60s the the insecticide pesticide DDT caused their eggs to become very fragile and riddle and when the birds would actually sit on the eggs they would crack and break and babies would die so there were very few eagles in the state of Maine and around the country in the middle part of the century but they have bounced back we had banned DDT of course and the birds responded here's a map of eagles in Maine starting 1945 and then ending 2013 and you can see a market increase there there are almost no eagles in Maine you know in the 40s and 50s and now they're much more common to see if you make the effort another one is loons common loons the direct interaction there is fishing right so loons don't have teeth they swallow their food whole they need to chew it up and so what they do is they have a thing called a gizzard they swallow stones and put them in their gizzard and then when their food comes in they crush up the food with their stones in their stomach and that's how they sort of chew and so that's how a lot of you know birds do it a lot of diving birds the trouble is that when humans drop their fishing tackle off their off their lures it mixes with the stones at the bottom of the seabed so here's a picture of a typical seabed filled with stones this is where a loon might go to get some stones for its gizzard and you can see here huh looks pretty normal to me the yellow is a lead tackle at a sum to the bottom that has that is blended in with the ground so you can see here it's almost impossible to tell in this clear you know picture without any water and sediment in the way where the lead tackle is if you're a loon there's no way you don't even know what lead is and so this is how loons ingest lead from our fishing lines into their bodies and lead kills them just like a human ingesting lead so I'll show you again how hard that is this is why lead tackle is such a problem loons are have lots of problems climate change water quality people getting too close to boats in their boats frankly but it's another success story when we work to educate ourselves about the issues facing loons and to past laws banning bare lead tackle the population of loon bounces back so this is a slide from our loon count program that shows that the population of loons in southern Maine has about doubled since the early ages so um direction interaction when you can recognize it and stop it it it helps here's a fun one these are house finches you guys probably all seen these maybe at your backyard bird feeders here in Maine they're not native to Maine did you know that they are they are a sort of a recent development the story with with house finches is they were a popular cage bird captured from their native ranges out in the southwest and sold out east as hollywood finches this they gave them a sexy new name hollywood finches um when there was a crackdown on um on captured birds it's illegal in the us to capture native birds and sell them um pet stores just sort of release them into the air um especially in new york city there's big release and because of that in the 40s or so um house finches took off they sort of established themselves all across the east and so you can see here now the current range map for house finches has this interesting east west split where there are you know this made this introduced population out east and is the native population out west and they're sort of merging in the middle a similar story for this bird you're raising collared dove um they were released the story is from a pet store in the in southern florida from a hurricane and a bunch of them escaped and they sort of populated the country so this was in the early 80s and i want to cycle through some slides here to show you how they've expanded just since the early 80s so you can see here the the purple squares are the presence of these birds look in southern florida and watch how they have changed um so this is 93 96 99 2002 they're spreading 2005 2008 2011 and then present day they've conquered the country um you notice that they're not really in main though for whatever reason they spread up through alaska but not really come come east but they're coming um this is the state's first record of raising collared up in main this is in falmouth in 2013 right doug um this is my friend doug's picture obviously he was there to see the first dove i was not but they're coming to main um as are these birds and vultures um we have there's two species of vultures common in the us on the left is our familiar turkey vulture um with the the silver behind the wings there uh the lower burn in this picture is another species the black vulture you can say they have thicker wings and they have silver on the tips of the on the sort of their hands rather than the trailing edge black vultures are not common in main but they're coming um here's a range of black vultures um you can see that they're sort of creeping up through the i-95 corridor following you know a dead roadkill on the road and we know they're coming because even the turkey vulture is a is a recent addition to the state of man um it was just 1982 where mainers found the first ever turkey vulture nest in the state near camp and so uh following roadkill on the roads likely turkey vultures came up and now are very commonly seen floating around we expect black vultures to follow what you can do direct interaction there's tons of things to do it depends on the bird don't hunt illegally don't use lead tackle please main autobahn is launching a lead tackle buyback program at certain stores check our website to see how you can get a voucher to buy non-lead tackle it works just as well and protects birds so there's lots of things you can do to help birds in different ways and i'm just cruising for time here so i'm keeping an eye on the clock man made climate change of course how have humans affected bird climate change um uh here's a bird that me is much more common out than used to be this is a red belly woodpecker it's not a well named bird um you can see here underneath the bird's leg that's the red belly of the red belly woodpecker um the red-headed woodpecker is already taken by different species so whatever um but this is a bird that is expanding its range in domain um and we know it's because of climate change no climate change to play in a role um this is what's typically thought of as a real southeastern bird a real sort of uh economized the southeast but it's now it's changing um here's you can see that so um in in red is a number of red belly woodpeckers seen in the winter in main you can see there really weren't any at all starting in 2004 they started jumped up the blue line is new Hampshire they've had a much more steadier increase we're not really sure why there's been this sort of jagged up and down in main but the trend is upward very clearly um and we know it's climate change playing a role because something called Bergman's rule and which says that when there's a population of animal that that goes from north to south from the equator to the poles say um that the larger individuals of that population are always toward the poles and the smaller ones are towards the equator that's a rule that applies to many different species around the world and we're seeing that same thing happen with um with uh red belly woodpeckers so um there never used to be red belly woodpeckers in main in the 50s the ones that were closest were the biggest red belly woodpeckers um now as there are red belly woodpeckers in main those are the largest and the ones that are further further south are smaller so we're seeing that that's a very clear temperature climate radiation there and there's been lots of other species that we know that have moved in uh into main as the climate and the waters have warmed um these are just some headlines that I picked from a quick google search uh the smooth mud crab is here the black sea bass is in our waters carolina wren is another one that we know is moved up so um we are very clearly seeing species that are more at home in warmer temperatures uh warmer waters coming into main um with the changing climate some of the best information recently is from a national autobahn report um called survival by degrees this came out just a few months ago and it really modeled out into the future um how habitats change and so a lot of the modeling a lot of what people are um assuming is going to happen to certain bird populations in main is based on habitat so we know that habitats are tied to certain climates and temperatures um you know where it's very hot and dry there's desert where it's very cold and dry there's tundra uh where it's wet there's rainforest so um the the climate dictates the habitat and the habitat dictates the species so if you can model out different climates um you can model out where the habitat will be in the future and we can see that some some pretty dire predictions for main based on different climate scenarios this is the common loon here there are three scenarios on the left it's the current uh current state you can see that the orange is where loons live now the middle side is with a 1.5 degrees difference of change on the right it's a three degree difference of change red means the birds aren't there anymore so you can see that if we allow the climate to warm within three degrees then the habitat in main just simply isn't habitable for common loons anymore and i'm going i have five minutes left so i'm going to go quickly a similar story for bobble links um uh if we continue things go um uh you know but this has uh there are different factors and sort of angles to this um for example wood thrush is a bird that whose range may increase in the state of main uh with a warming climate you can see that parts of its southern range it'll be pushed out of and it'll move into main as main becomes more southerly and habitable to net and so climate change means lots of different things to different birds um here i encourage you all to go to the national autobahn uh website and check it out um this is their slide overall for main showing which types of birds will increase or decrease um the biggest hit in main is likely to be to be our boreal forest birds which is what a lot of people go to the range the birding festival to see birds like canada j boreal tickety spruce grouse they depend on this deep forest boreal habitat which is sort of most southern in main as our climate warrants that habitat will be pushed out potentially of the state and the birds with it and so um there uh we're we're watching that and working to take action so take some action um thankfully main uh is doing uh really great work on climate change right now governor mills has set up the main climate council um to work with um all kinds of voices in main to develop a climate action plan um to figure out how we can respond to climate change and we're very proud to have uh two uh members of main autobahn on the climate council sally stop along the lives of donahue um and they are uh working hard but we encourage you to help out we really need your voices here because the state needs to know that people are want climate change um to be stopped and want to protect the birds from from uh from the effects we encourage you to come to our website go to main autobahn.org slash advocacy you can sign our petition to the main climate council to advocate for a strong plan um and we encourage you to do so we have lots of other actions on our website um and if you sign up at main autobahn.org slash advocacy for our action alerts so we can keep you posted on all that so sorry for the rush on the second half of the presentation thanks for bearing with me through the craziness of the morning i've got two minutes left um so i'd be happy to take questions if there are already in the chat um and um thank you to dug and everyone moderating um and helping me get through the second half without interruption um so great are there any questions out there um i'm happy to look and Doug asks i can't see the chat room for whatever reason sorry so um we're just slowly getting people entered into the room here with okay hesitation um so in the chat i can see the chat too yeah yeah there was a good question uh richard asking yesterday i saw hundreds of mating horseshoe crabs in middle bay does that suggest more red knots good question um so horseshoe crabs have been here for long as long as anything has been here they've been on the planet for millions of years um and are very common in Maine you traditionally the the most famous breeding areas of them are on the coast of Delaware for example and i uh and are a critical stopping over point for lots of shorebirds including red knots um horseshoe crabs will will come and mate during the full moon lay their eggs in the millions and um in this in the sand uh right there in the on the beach in shallow water and that's just delicious caviar for these um migrating birds as they move northward um that's a good question i don't know if that's if there's going to be an if there's an increase in horseshoe crabs because of warming waters in Maine uh and the and the shorebirds are able to adapt and understand where the new breeding populations of horseshoe crabs are then i would imagine to be increased in certain birds as they stop over north um um i don't know if there's been a sort of scientific following of that so far but that is possible um i know that we do have um our own horseshoe crabs here already um but whether that population is increasing i'm not sure why aren't new chicks increasing at the same rate as adult loons that's a great question one we didn't get to yesterday um uh a lot of that has to do with um ranges and so one thing that's not increasing is the amount of territories going on uh and so um as you know there are only so many birds loons can actually breed on any lake at any given time and so although there's many adults back some of them aren't breeding as much because of the habitat restrictions and so um uh we see uh one thing we're hoping is that as the loon population of Maine um increases some of those birds will expand elsewhere maybe out of Maine to um to uh populate populate different lakes in different places so in a lot especially in southern Maine we're sort of um almost full on the habitats in the lakes we have and so um the underlining messages that loons are doing great and there are more um adults in Maine maybe just not on our lakes thank you for to uh uh Reverend Mary Zachary Lang for protecting the bobbling so it's a they're a fun bird to have so all right we got through it thank you all for joining and getting through the crazy zoom bobbing of the morning that was insane but we are undeterred we are the range of the birding festival and we're not going to let some some uh silly kids ruin our fun