 A little time talking first about what do we know about our declining birds and then what are scientists predicting might happen in the future. And then we'll talk a little bit more about what you can do to help ameliorate this problem. So what do we know? Well, there have been some recent studies and resources that I tapped into for this presentation and you can certainly go and look at yourself afterwards if you're interested. But the National Association of Bird Conservation Initiative, no, North American Bird Conservation Initiative came out with a report in 2019 called the State of Canada's Birds. I highly recommend going to find this online. It's a really well done publication and there's tons of great information in there. There's a lot of great information in there about what's happened to our birds. They've collected based on all kinds of different survey work that's being done all across Canada. And then one of the other recent publications that came out was a publication by National Audubon called Survival by Degrees and this is really looking at what might happen to our birds in light of changes from our warming climate. And they used all kinds of modeling to make predictions about what might happen. So I tapped into that as well. And even though we are not in Canada, we are close to Canada. And so a lot of the information that's coming out of Canada is very relevant to our situation here in Maine as well. And the first thing that I wanted to show you was that you'll see on this graph that most of our birds since 1970 are showing dramatic declines in population as much as over 60% decline for our aerial insectivores. We have a couple of groups of birds that are actually showing an increase. So it's not all bad news, either relatively stable or relatively stable like our all birds. But waterfowl and raptors have both shown increases. And this is largely because of very specific conservation steps that we have taken as a communities, scientists, hunters, anglers, conservationists. And so we know that we can turn this decline around if we've committed ourselves to doing that. But there's a lot of challenges that our birds are facing. And National Audubon in the Survival by Degrees is predicting big changes for most of our birds along the Atlantic flyway. And if you want to go look at their report, this is a page from the report. Actually, it's on the website that looks at what might happen if we have a two degree Celsius warming of the planet. How many species are going to be highly vulnerable? We have 18 moderately vulnerable. I can't see through the 88 and low vulnerable, about 60. And then 100 or so species that are relatively stable. And this is based on summer season. So they have this great interactive program. You can go online. You can see at different different warming scenarios how these numbers change. And then they actually feature which species fall under one each of these categories. And we're gonna look at a couple of those in a little bit. The study that raised lots of attention in the press was this study called The Decline of the North American Avafana that was published in Science last year. And the bottom line is that they have documented since 1970 based on 13 different sources of data that we have lost 2.9 billion birds. Dramatic declines. And these are just two different graphs showing the same thing. This comes from a website called 3 billion birds. And it's a great website for more information. And this comes from Cornell Lab of Ornithology who jumped right on this this information as well. And so when you start looking at the different habitats or different groups of species, things sort of spread out a little bit. Each of the different groups has seen different kinds of declines. And you'll notice right off the bat here that grassland birds are showing the most significant declines. Shorebirds, the next most boreal forest birds. These are the birds that are nesting in northern Maine and up into Canada. And then we're going to skip over the western and tundra birds, but then eastern forest birds. They're all showing declines, right? Some more dramatic than others. So let's take a closer look at each one of those groups. For grassland birds, we're seeing a 53% decline in total numbers of birds. And at least 74% of those grassland species are showing decline. So some of them are doing okay, but most of them are showing declines. I can't even really picture what 718 million birds looks like, but that's a lot of birds. That's a lot fewer birds that we have on the landscape today compared with 1970. And here's a few of the birds that have been affected by that. Savannah sparrows, eastern meadowlarks, bobble inks. Just down the road for me used to be, there is a wonderful farmland there. And I would say 20 years ago, all three of these species were nesting there. Now, zero. And this is just happening over and over again all across the country and the continent. Here's another way of looking at that. So tree swallows and bobble inks are both showing dramatic declines based on breeding bird survey data. Reading bird surveys have been run for 50 years. They are surveys that are set up along road routes. People monitor those routes. They listen for all the different songs of different birds and they record which species they hear. And so over time, again, since 1975 to 2013, you can see that we are seeing a slow but steady decline, except for this little blip here, in bobble inks and likewise a steeper decline for tree swallows. And these are the number of routes that have been run. So it's not always the same number of routes every year, but it's been relatively stable. So the numbers are true declines. And then we also have seen dramatic declines in American kestrels. This is a species that sometimes feeds in grassland areas. They nest in cavities. And I used to see them everywhere. And now when I see one, I get really excited. It's sort of like when you see bats because we hardly have any bats left anymore either. And it's just I get very excited. So again, here's a dramatic decline in their numbers from 1975 to 2013. And the number of routes that have been surveyed has has been somewhat variable. But that's not the reason for the decline. And then if we look at what is the future of the world look like for these birds, not only are they losing habitat, and that's partly why they are declining, but they're also facing a dramatic change in the climate. So we have here predictions from the National Audubon modeling project, where they are saying this is what sort of the current distribution is for bobble links right now. And they're relatively stable. This is with 1.5 degree of warming. This is what is predicted to happen. So this dark red color is range that would be lost. The orange is more or less stable. And then the blue is actually range new range that they will be expanding to. If we warm more like 2.0 degrees Celsius, which is now what many people are thinking we might be headed towards, you're looking at a dramatic shift in the range. And in Maine, you can see that you can see that much of the southern and eastern part of the state will no longer have bobble links at all. Again, these are predictions, but it's a it's an interesting thing to contemplate. So now let's shift onto our shorebirds. These are also showing a dramatic decline. 68% of all of our shorebirds are showing declines. And that decline is overall about 37%. 17 million birds lost. This includes all those wonderful shorebirds you see dancing around the coastal, coastal shores. And, and then things like the redneck fallow ropes that used to be really abundant up in Lubeck and along the far eastern coast. And then purple sandpipers. This is a non breeding sanderling and black belly clovers. These are all species that don't breed here in Maine, but they migrate through here and they depend on our beaches and our mudflats. And in the case of the purple sandpiper, even some of our rocky areas for feeding and gaining weight before they jump off and migrate to southern climates. I was up in Lubeck far eastern Maine a couple of weeks ago and I started seeing some black belly clovers coming through. But the big, big flocks of sandpipers hadn't really started through there yet. But fallow ropes, I had been there 20 some years ago and you just see the sea of fallow ropes off the far eastern coast and we hardly see any of those coming through anymore. So let's look at one species in particular, the redknot. The redknot, at least among birders and among, especially among birds who care about shorebirds, is quite famous at the moment. Not for good reasons though. The redknot has seen a decline of 80% in just the last 10 years in their numbers. This is a bird that migrates from James Bay up in Canada. So James Bay is attached to Hudson Bay, if you know where that is. So they're going from Hudson Bay all the way down to Argentina, a distance of over 18,000 miles annually. And one of the key things that they need for during their migration is feeding on horseshoe crab eggs in the Delaware Bay. And at the moment, there's a big, the horseshoe crabs have been over harvested. There are very few eggs and consequently the redknot have declined dramatically. And so you should be, if you're really lucky, you might be able to see some of these redknot passing through Maine. Now we have some folks who are out on the beaches monitoring our shoreward migration because we're trying to keep tabs on what's happening, who's coming through, how many are there and compare that with past years and also look at how is disturbance, human disturbance affecting their behavior as they're trying to feed and put on weight before they fly south. But it's not all bad news. We have at Maine Audubon have been working for over 35 years on trying to help both piping clovers and lease turns nest successfully on the beaches of Maine. This is a cute little piping clover chick. They build their nests right on the sand. We put up fencing around the sand every year. And you can see that since we started the project in 1981, it's been sort of a slow, steady rise, but then we had a big crash in the early 2000s. And we worked very closely with the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Warden Service, the law enforcement folks, and the predator control folks. And we increased all of our outreach and education. And consequently, we were able to slowly rebuild that population. And both the number of nesting pairs and the number of chicks that survive and fledge, fledging is when they are old enough that they can fly on their has risen steadily. And this year, this is a little head heading from an article in the Portland Press Herald on June 17th, we have had phenomenal numbers of both pairs and young. So we had 98 nesting pairs. Now 90, we started with about 10 or 11 in 1981. So we now had 98 nesting pairs and almost 200, 199 fledglings this year. So that's a great, great success story. But it does take a lot of work and a lot of attention every year. Because of course, they like to nest in the same places that people like to play. Now, if we look at threats from climate change, we know that these same piping plovers and then also some of our salt marsh sparrows are subject to sea level rise. And once we start having more sea level rise, we also have that we're experiencing bigger storms, you know, you've all heard about the terrible hurricanes south of us, but we get these big storm surges here in Maine too that are much higher than they have been in the past. And those create real challenges for these birds. Not only does it wash out, wash some of the beach and dune habitat that they might nest in, but for these salt marsh sparrows, they nest in the high marsh areas. But if the sea level rise and the storm surge is too high, it will actually wash over their nests. And normally, I just learned about this a couple of years ago, but it's quite, quite astounding. Normally the young, once they hatch, the eggs will float a little bit and then they'll go back down in the nest and they'll stay there and they'll be fine, unless they float completely away. And once the young hatch, they can actually climb up on the grasses to get above the flooded water for a little while, but they can't do that day after day or when it's way too high. Similarly, our piping plow birds, if we have high flooding on the beaches, their nests and eggs will get washed away. So they are facing some pretty serious threats in the future. And then while we're talking about shorebirds, I thought I'd also just put in a little bit of information here about some of our coastal island nesting birds. Everybody knows puffins. We love our puffins. They're very dramatic looking, right? But in 19, in 2012, we saw a dramatic decline in our puffin population and in chick survival. And the main reason for that was because the sea water is warming. The Gulf of Maine is seeing some of the highest rates of increase in water temperatures of anywhere in the world as a result of climate change. And typically, the puffins would fly off from their nests to find these little sand laces, the long, narrow sand laces that they would bring back for their chicks. But instead, they couldn't find those and they were finding these oblong-shaped birds, I mean, fish, that the chicks couldn't swallow. So the nests with the chicks in them, which are in the side of the hill under the rocks or in the ground, these nests were full of these fish, but the chicks were dying of starvation anyway. So climate change has the ability to completely flip our food web chains. Likewise, for our beloved loon, which of course, many of us love and think of as very emblematic of Maine, we've seen in some other states, we've seen that they are really suffering from a higher number of black flies and more biting insects, really harassing them while they're on their nests. They're on their nests for about a month and they're on them 24 hours a day and sort of open. We're also seeing an increase in certain kinds of diseases. They're seeing some new parasites that seem to be more abundant in these birds now that were not common before. And we're seeing them try to feed on other kinds of foods that are not their natural foods because their native foods have been displaced by introduced crabs or snails or even non-native fish. So between that and there's other challenges they're facing just with warmer temperatures. They don't do well and they there are cold weather bird. Like many of us who live in Maine, they like a little bit cooler weather than the southeastern folks. And so there's a lot of speculation about what's going to happen to them as the temperature is warm. And here's another scenario from National Audubon that suggests based on their habitat needs and warming temperatures. This is their current habitat range. These are the changes we might expect with 1.5 degree change losing their habitat in the lower parts. Expanding way up high. Here's James Bay right there, by the way. And then by if we see two degrees warming, you see that much of Maine would be potentially without loons or with very few loons. So that would be kind of a tragedy. Then another group of birds that is really suffering dramatic declines are our aerial insectivores. These are birds that fly on the wing and catch insects on the wing. So they are here's some tree swallows that are perched on this nesting box. And then they fly out over open areas, either water or fields or meadows, and they catch insects while they're flying through the air. They have really wide mouths that can collect a lot of insects all at one time. We also have things like our night hawks and whipper whales that are showing dramatic declines. Again, I saw a night hawk just recently when I was out camping a couple weeks ago and I was so excited because I used to see them all the time and I hardly ever see them anymore. So we've got 32% decline across North America, a 59% decline in Canada. And again, almost three quarters of the species in this group are showing dramatic declines. One of the reasons is because we're losing our insects. Sarah has actually been helping work on some gathering information about what's happening to our insects not only across the world but here in Maine. But these data are taken from studies in other parts of the world, but you can see that based on 26 different global locations between 1990 and 2015, we're seeing a dramatic decline in total biomass of insects. Now some of you might think that's a good idea because they are not bothering us, but actually they are the basic basis of many of our food chains. And so it's really a problem. And they also are so important for all of our pollination of many of our crops and other plants. Another way to look at that is here in Germany. They looked at what's happening with insects in protected areas. So these are areas that have been protected, no harvesting, no disruption of the environment. And they documented a 75% decline in flying insects over the past 27 years. That's a huge loss. In Puerto Rico, we've got temperatures, increasing temperatures that are blamed for asynchronic between insects and those species that feed on those insects. And so we've got insects are coming out hatching at a different time than the species that are feeding on them. And so that's a problem. And it's not only loss of insects that are causing problems for our aerial insectivores, but we've got habitat loss. We've got habitat changes in habitat. We've got climate change, and then loss of insects. This is a great little graphic I thought from the, from Canadians. Well, an article in avian conservation and ecology, but it's Canadian you can see because it's in French and English. And habitat loss and habitat degradation are really becoming problematic in specifically for this group of birds because so much of our agricultural land used to have areas where there was a knife buffer between the agricultural area and stream or the next agricultural field or whatever. And those have all been plowed. Many of those have been plowed under now. And so we have very little of that sort of weedy area that where insects were more abundant. And then somewhat on the brighter side, we've also been seeing an expansion of certain species in Maine. For example, our Eastern bluebirds. They're this is one of those species that's been documented to have moved further north. So over the since I can't read that number because my screen sharing thing is in the way. But since the early 1900s to 2014, you can see that the number of bluebirds that were documented on what's called the Christmas bird count. So this is when birders go out right around Christmas time and document all the different species that they see, they were pretty uncommon early on. But since about 2007, we're starting to see more and more bluebirds that are hanging out in the fall. And they are some time cases staying throughout the whole winter. These are largely insectivorous birds. So they feed predominantly on insects, but they also feed on berries. And so they're finding a way to make it through the main winters now. So another group of that we is really important to Maine are our forest birds. Since Maine is over 95% forested. This is where many of our birds hang out. And among both Eastern forest birds and boreal forest birds. Again, we're seeing dramatic declines. Most of the species are showing declines over 50% are over and loss of many, many millions of birds. So another way to think about this is that it means one in four of all Eastern forest birds, such as the Yellow Rumped Warbler and one in three of all boreal forest birds such as this Bay Breasted Warbler are no longer coloring our woods with their songs and their beautiful flitting around the in the in between the trees. So dive into this a little bit more detail. The Canada Warbler is one of those species that has shown dramatic decline. They nest right near the ground in thick shrubby areas. And you can see on this graph down here, dramatic declines from 1970 to 2010. And that has continued since then. The wood thrush is another species that has declined dramatically. They need fairly large unfragmented forests that tend to be have a lot of mature forest characteristics with them. And oops, sorry. And predictions are that the situation with wood thrushes will only get worse as the climate changes. They're predicted to shift their range. And population may still be declining. And then here's another species that we're finding more commonly in Maine with the change in climate, red-bellied woodpeckers. I don't know how many of you have seen these. You know, again, 20 years ago, you almost never saw them in Maine. I remember when one of my neighbors down the road who's an avid hunter angler and naturalist called me up and he says, Sally, I got this woodpecker at my on my feeder. I've never seen before. What is it? He sent me a picture and sure enough, it's red belly woodpecker. So between 1950, I can see that they they have been marching north. So now let's move into what can you do to help? We've got a real problem here. I know, for example, a friend of mine who he's in his 70s. Now he tells me these stories about what it was like during migration time in the spring, when there were just be tons of birds everywhere all in the yard in the fields in the trees. And he says, if you just don't see or hear that anymore. So we're probably not going to get back to that place again, but we can do better. So what can we do? Well, I pulled some of these recommendations out of the the birds of Canada report, because I thought they were so great. But I've added a few. So on the left hand side here, you'll see there's sort of a listing of threats that each of these different bird groups face. And then some conservation actions that we can take. And I've added a few more on the right side that are particularly important for Maine. So, you know, we need to protect the few remaining grasslands, supporting sustainable range fed beef, protecting water by using as little pesticides as we can. And then trying to address the underlying causes of climate change. But in Maine, one of the things that we can do is work with landowners on delaying mowing, if at all possible. And also just last year in the main legislature, we were one of many organizations that supported a proposed ban on neonicotinoids, which are known to be very problematic for insects and birds. Here's a program that has gotten off in Maine over the last couple of years that's sponsored by the Somerset County Soil and Water Conservation District. They're working with landowners to who have farms on trying to create more habitat for grassland birds and protect and give them an opportunity to have at least one clutch or one nest, successful nest a year before you might get around to mowing. So they've come up with some really creative approaches to this. It's very personalized for each different landowner and landowner needs. And I encourage any of you who may be farmers and may be interested in birds to check out this egg allies and and reach out to them. They'll come over, they'll do a visit. They'll talk to you about your goals, the goals of the program and how those two might mesh. And then if we turn to shorebirds, as I mentioned, as an example with the red knot, protecting those migratory stopover places is really important for these shorebirds. So we can do that here in Maine and with our we have what's called the significant wildlife habitat feeding and roosting areas that have been designated by the Department of Fish and Wildlife. These are places where these birds will hang out during their migration feed before they take off. And they're really important to give the shorebirds plenty of room to feed and not disturb them while they are feeding and roosting. So we can support that wherever possible. And then again, I address climate change, clean up our beaches. You know, if you're many of you are from the Farmington area, so you're not too close to beaches, but for those of you who might be closer, you can host a beach cleanup. We are seeing more and more plastics showing up in birds digestive systems. And in some cases killing them as a result of that, it's quite alarming. So anything we can do to keep plastic off of the beaches and other trash and host a beach cleanup can be really helpful for these birds, especially during migration. And more specifically, with our piping plovers and lease turns, if you come to visit the beach sometime, there are a number of things that you can do to help share the beach successfully with piping plovers. We have a crew that's out every summer interacting with people well, not so much this year, but typically. And we have a lot a list of ideas that you can keep in mind when you're out on the beaches. We have these great little signs here that say restricted area, don't go beyond this because that's where the bird nests are or where they're trying to hide during the busy times of the day with their young. And if you want to learn more about what's happening to our shorebirds, waterfowl and wading birds, and our piping plovers and lease turns, I encourage you to check out these publications that are all on the main Audubon website. This talks about the international significant role that we play here in Maine for shorebird during migration, and then the importance of that significant wildlife habitat, and similar to our waterfowl and wading birds. And then every year we put together this newsletter that talks about what's happened out on the beaches this year for our plovers and turns. Now let's turn to our aerial insectivores. As we talked about, those insects are so important. One of the things that we need to do is reduce or eliminate use of pesticides wherever we can. And then you might also think about building a nest box and putting a nest box out nest boxes have been really successful, we used by our tree swallows. And it has helped increase their populations in a number of places. And then for our forest birds, the key thing here in the in Maine is to keep our forests as forests and not have them turn into something else. And, and then try to steward those forested areas so that they have high quality breeding habitat, and then also keep our invasive pests and check that are coming in as a result of warming, climate conditions, and threaten the health of our forests. And then the other thing, of course, is to try to look at where do these birds spend the rest of their lives when they're not here in Maine? And is there anything that we can do to help protect their wintering habitat or their migratory habitat? So I'm going to delve in a little bit deeper into our forest birds, just because that's something that we are working very, very strategically on right now. Forest landowners and forest managers in Maine can play a really key role in helping these forest birds. So a number of years ago, we developed this program called Forestry for Maine Birds. It's a collaboration between Maine Audubon, the Maine Forest Service in the Fish and Wildlife and the Forest Stewards Guild. And this is just a snapshot from our website. We have lots of great information there, and I'm just going to share a few of those with you. So the key thing is that forest birds really depend on Maine. Our forest birds along the Atlantic flyway, which is all along the eastern seaboard here, depend on Maine. Look at this big green blob here. These green blobs are the last best blocks of forested habitat that remain throughout the eastern US. And look how important Maine is. It's so important that the National Audubon and Bird Conservation International has designated the Western Maine Mountains as a globally important bird area. The reason they designated it as globally important is because there are so many different species that breed there, and there are so many individuals of those species that breed there. It's key to the survival of these species. Think of it as a baby bird factory. And even though there's all these other threats that birds are facing, if they can't make more baby birds, then they are going to continue to plummet. And one of the things to keep in mind is that different species of forest birds use different types of forest, whether it's a coniferous forest, or a mixed forest, or deciduous forest, and they also use different forest features. So some of them love to sing from the tops of the trees here, like a black burning warbler. Our little Canada warbler, as I mentioned earlier, likes to be down here closer to the ground. Our black-throated blue warbler likes hobble-bush, and then things like flicker and yellow-bellied sapsucker, like snags, dead-standing trees. So we put together a series of resources, guides for foresters, woodland owners, landowners, and loggers to use to help them manage their forests in ways that help these forest birds with birds in mind. And we have these great little trading cards too that feature 20 different species that we're sort of using as focus species, and also the habitats that they use. So really quickly, this is some of the features that we're sort of looking for in our forests, in our forest management. We're looking for at least three different layers of vegetation from the understory, less than six feet mid-story, six to 30 feet overstory, over 30 feet. Are there gaps in the forest where insectivorous birds can find their food? Is there water? Is there a number of birds that are attracted to water? And then, so these are all different sort of live features, and then we've got some dead features here. Are there dead-standing trees or snags? Is there coarse-woody material? That's these big piles of, or down logs on the forest floor. Is there fine woody material, these smaller branches where birds can hide and find insects? Leaf litter for things like oven birds that can build their nest on the ground using leaf dead leaves. And at the beginning of the session here, Nancy mentioned that Drew Barton is going to be speaking later this month. So he and a couple other folks put together this book called The Changing Nature of the Main Woods. And one of the fascinating things that he talks about in there is how the pre-settlement forest compares to today. And what I want to draw your attention to is that, so the pre-settlement is the blue, the orange is the pre-settlement, blue is hardwood, pre-settlement, orange is mixed wood. But historically, old, uneven age forests that are, that means where trees are all different ages as opposed to sort of one age that's all grown up at the same time, used to cover as much as 89% of the forest. Today, those older forests cover only about 1%, 1 to 2% of our landscape. So one of the things that we're also trying to encourage through our Forestry for Main Birds program is to help create more mature forests, older forests, more mature forests that have all of these features that these forest birds need. Three layers of vegetation, gaps, old snags, and then down woody material and water. We like to see that in our forest. A lot of those components are missing in many of our forests today. Another thing we are trying to encourage is protecting and connecting diverse landscapes. We know that with climate change, the particular species, whether it's the plant species or animal species, that are going to show up might be different than what we have today. But if we can protect and steward our mountains, our lakes, rivers, wetlands, and then also provide ways for animals to move around like this great stream smart crossing, then they'll be able to adapt and move across the landscape over time. So I'm just going to wrap up here now with a couple of final thoughts. This is a little diagram that came from the North American Bird Conservation Initiative that, and I love the caption here that says, hey, what's good for birds is good for us. And you can read here, I won't go through this, but you can read here. There's a number of different things that you can do to help our birds going forward. You can do this on a local level, you can do it at state level, you can do it at the federal level. There are many ways to get involved. And this is a similar list of things you can do to help birds that is kind of put together by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Includes things like making windows safer. We know that a lot of birds are killed during migration or otherwise when they fly into windows because they see the reflection of vegetation there and they think that they can just fly through the trees. We know that cats are a huge problem for birds and so we'd love to see more people keep their cats indoors. We have a lot of people in the United States are really fond of lawns but actually they're kind of like a desert for wildlife. So if you can replace some of your lawn by planting native species that attract insects and attract birds, that's a great thing. We have this wonderful program that made Audubon called Bringing Nature Home where we are promoting this idea of planting native plants and we're growing and selling them as well. We already talked a little bit about the importance of avoiding pesticides that means both at the home level and then also on a more commercial level. Another thing you can do is buy bird-friendly coffee. The reason to do that is because many of our birds that breed here in Maine in the summer go down to Central America, South America in the winter and a lot of those places are coffee plantations but there are ways to create coffee plantations that also have lots of, have more variety, have other vegetation in them as opposed to just coffee plants. Talked a little bit about the importance of, or the dangers of plastic, so anything you can do to use less plastic and help recover that plastic so it doesn't end up in the ocean and in our birds would be great. And then we have a number of opportunities for you to help participate in community science, watching birds, reporting what you see. There's tons of programs out there, not just at Maine Audubon but other places as well. So I'm going to leave this up just for a minute. This is, if you're interested in learning more, there's a whole bunch of references here that you can follow. We might be able to put those in the chat if anybody wants to recover those or you can, if you have a smartphone, you can just take a picture of this page so that you have it as reference for later on. This is a lot where I got a lot of the information that I used for tonight. And finally, just say thanks for listening and I'm happy to take any questions now if we still have time. That's great Sally. Thank you. Yes, we do. We still have about six or seven minutes and we're just getting a couple of questions in the box now. So there's a question that says the slide with seven simple actions to help birds. Is this image something that is available as a poster? Could it be purchased as a metal sign to be posted on trails or something similar? I don't know but it is on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website as a very prominent page there. So it would be worth trying to find out more about it. It is very catchy, isn't it? It is. It's nice and simple. And then there's another question, where can we find information on appropriate nesting boxes and platforms for birds that might frequent your particular neighborhood? There are lots of different plans on websites. I don't know the best website for that right now but I could ask our staff naturalist who's been involved in some of that and get back to you if you want to leave us a contact information. That's great. And we could also send it to the NAPS and maybe just distribute it to everyone. Another question about making windows safer. So seeing more than one product for making windows safer, do you recommend anything in particular or are there common mistakes to avoid? What a great question! I should say what a timely question because just yesterday Sarah and I both got updated on some work that a couple of our other colleagues at Maine Audubon are doing on this very topic. And they've been working with architects in Portland and they've been work they one of them had done some work in Washington DC and so yes there are certain things that work better than others and actually our staff naturalist Doug Hitchcox just wrote a great little little piece on that in the Portland Press Herald last Sunday I believe. So that's another thing that we might be able to send the link to from and send that to the NAPS. So I could send it out to everybody. We must have the list we can send it out. Yeah I think we do. Yeah and then I have a request that you put the resource slide up again. Yes there we go. And could you comment on feeding birds any particular guidelines? Well one of the questions we often get about feeding birds is is it good for them or not so good for them? And studies have shown that that most birds don't become dependent on that food source. They move around looking for food at different places throughout their livelihood and so maybe 25 20 to 30 percent of their diet would come from those those feeders so go ahead feed the birds it's okay they like it. I'm a big fan of black sunflower seeds because those are really nutritious and most birds will eat those some some things some birds like goldfinch somebody early on said they have a lot of goldfinches in redfield. Goldfinches prefer thistle seed which is small and you need a kind of a different feeder for holding the thistle seed than the black sunflower seeds but we have lots of different feeders and lots of great information about feeding birds at our nature store at Mann Audubon and you could you can give our store manager Stanley a call and he'd be happy to walk you through that. And I believe that I just saw an email that the bird seed sale is on so I think I just saw that today. So it's a good time just to order your seed. Yep and we have a question can we feed all year or just season? You can feed all year they're more they're more interested during the fall and winter time speaking as opposed to spring and summer when there's more natural foods out there but they they will still come during the another one. We're we're into feeding the birds right now so are all seeds for feeders equal? Well no and that's why I was saying I prefer the black sunflower seeds but you will find a lot of mixed seeds and mixes and some people prefer those mixes the mixes a lot of times you get a lot of stuff down on the ground because the smaller things like millet will fall through the cracks and that will attract things like morning doves and squirrels but there's there's so I I encourage you to go with black sunflower seeds do you have another thought on that Sarah you want to add? I don't but my sister always feeds birds with the black sunflowers and she sent me a picture of the beautiful sunflowers that came from the ones that were missed by the birds and she has this wall of sunflowers and she's thrilled to death. That's a great benefit. Yes so we also have some questions what about hummingbirds what about feeding hummingbirds? There are special hummingbird feeders that you can get that that will they basically they have tubes that the hummingbird can feed with their bill and their tongue into they you can make your own you can buy hummingbird food but mostly you can also just make it your own and there's lots of recipes online for how to do that it's just a sugar water concoction that you can make and put into that feeder the thing about the feeders is usually they have something red on them that attracts the attention of the hummingbird. So we have a couple more questions one is are pigeons native to Maine? No we have rock doves that are native but pigeons are not really native. And question on the migration routes of the piping plover what is the route that they take coming to Maine? Well just a few years ago we learned that our piping plovers tend to go south along the coast for a little ways but then they winter in the Bahamas and so they and the reason we know this is because for quite a few years we have not been able to ban these birds because they are endangered species both the piping plovers and the least terms are endangered species here in Maine and but there were some that were banded up in Canada and they will move through the US and then go to the Bahamas so that was kind of a surprise people thought they just all went to the southeastern part of the states. They're no fools they're going to the Bahamas. So question on the back on the loons so we saw how the with climate change it doesn't look good for loons is the loon population close to being endangered? No we have a really healthy population of loons here in Maine that loons are endangered in some of our neighboring states like in Vermont and I think they may still be threatened in a couple of the other northeastern states I am not actually sure what this current status is but fortunately here in Maine our population has been increasing since the early 1980s we've been tracking them to the same degree that we've been tracking our plovers and turns and their their population is growing but they do face all these threats you know they have to share their lakes with people who are building around the lakes displacing their nesting sites in some cases causing pollution in the lakes or which increasing phosphorus load which then increases algae and then that causes problems for the loons to be able to see their prey they are birds that actually feed by looking you know looking through the water at their prey and so they need clear cold water and but they they've been they've been doing pretty well and I think another reason for that is because we have a very active participation but we have a loon count every year we have over a thousand people who help us with that they also help spread the word about how to share your lake with loons and be respectful of them and we have a lot of information on our website on that as well if you want to join our loon count you're welcome to do that and we are two minutes after eight but we just have a couple more questions folks are welcome to to leave but we will stay and answer the last couple questions sticking with the loons I've been watching well first we had a comment that that Shanti's seeing them on the beach and on Skudik and and then another anonymous attendee has been watching an immature loon for about a month no other loons are seen with it and there are several other loons on the lake is this normal this time of year everything's they all get mixed up so during the early time of in May June July you tend to see loons in pairs for the most part on our lakes but then all of our loons the juveniles when they well a couple things so right now just this morning I was over at my cousin's lake near Bridgeton there were five loons together there was one pair that nested down the lake and they successfully hatched two chicks one of them was taken by an eagle the other one was killed by another loon so this lone third wheel loon and now we've got five adults that are hanging out together so this time of year loons that have not been successful in nesting or that have already fledged their young will gather together they're very social at this time of year they hang out on a lake they feed and and and they will sometimes congregate with as many as 30 to 50 loons at one time and then when ice starts forming on the lakes they move to the ocean and the juveniles move to the ocean usually after then after the adults before ice comes in though and they stay on the ocean for four to five years before they head back to the lake where they were hatched and where they will try to set up their own nest and raise their own young so those if it's good a point you're probably seeing juveniles either juveniles uh you know juveniles from previous years that are out there. A couple uh moving on to different species um Joy is interested in um designating our fields for bobble links but haven't seen any in the area in Oxford County is there a way to attract them or what how big a field do you need or yes so typically they need at least around well they do best when they have at least five acres of field and it does matter what the makeup of the plants in that field are so for example at our headquarters in Main Anubon at Gilsburg Farm we used to have bobble links and metal arcs there and we still have a few but we stopped the the person who had been haying our fields regularly we um no longer was able to do that and so we bush hog our fields once a year but that's the the makeup of the plants in that field has changed so dramatically that the bobble links don't like it as well they really like more the grassy kind of plants as opposed to a lot of the um well we're getting a lot of golden rod and bed straw and other things like that in the fields so the flowers so yes it does matter the folks at Egg Allies which is listed right here at the top can definitely work with you on how to how to try to attract them in your fields right and here's um this is the last question that I have in the box this morning we saw a ring-necked pheasant in Winslow for the first time in over 30 years is this population increasing I don't know the answer to that they they are not native so there that's an introduced I mean that's it could be a bird that was came from a game farm and was released um that we don't really as far as I know we don't really have a a sustaining population of pheasants in Maine do you know anything different Sarah? I don't and actually I was going to ask I know some other states in New England their Fish and Wildlife Services still release pheasants does does Maine do that for me um that's all we have for questions we're about 10 minutes over um thank everybody for for coming and for your great questions and um I kept a little list of some of the things that we said we will send over to you and um we will get those out and this has been recorded so it will be available and I think Burt had mentioned that it will be available on the Western Maine chapter website as well as on ours so unless um Sally or the Knapps have anything last to say I think we can um thank everyone and and um head home great well thanks for coming everybody Sally thank you very much thank you all Sally thanks for hosting us yes thank you and thank you Sarah thank you good to see you guys again that was that was wonderful uh really good we had a really good attendance and uh appreciate all the time and effort you put into it yes that was a really good percentage we had 94 people sign up we had 89 people attend wow wow it's really good it is good we we up here in Farmington pay attention to these things thanks all right thank you all right thanks thanks Sarah for hosting that was very helpful that was great thanks all right bye bye