 I think it only came to us but in the chat someone mentioned they were having audio issues. So I will just say if anyone does have to disconnect or anything we're recording this you can always catch it online in a little bit. I'm not going to repeat my introduction. They'll just have to live without it. Let's see. So I'm going to start promptly. If there's one thing I do a terrible job at it's sticking to my schedule when I do these talks. I'm going to get distracted already as Bill is just sharing what an awesome migration it's been especially the last couple of days. I wanted to make sure if there's one thing you take away from tonight's talk you should be this great resource which is birdcast birdcast.info is the website. One of the coolest things on it are they'll basically use weather radar next round radar information to forecast bird migration so predicting tonight that there will be 80 million birds moving across the lower 48 states. It's going to drop down a little bit. You can see we're going to have some precipitation in a couple of nights so maybe save your sick days. Don't feel birding quite yet. And then the fun one this is just looking at here was last night so you'll see that sunset showing as the red bar moves across and now watch the number of birds in flight. So this is 2 a.m. 200 million birds passing over and then here's sunrise this morning as birds are now landing. So anyways birdcast.info does just an amazing job helping us kind of predict some of the movements of birds and certainly helps me be a better birder in the spring or at least know which days are worth heading out birding. Every day is worth going out I should say but so this is a fun talk. This is one I originally put together years ago when I first started working for Maine Audubon. I've always been kind of interested in these changes. Birds are kind of a wonderful way for us to kind of monitor what's going on. They tend to be a lot easier to keep track of than a lot of other things like insects or mammals are quite challenging. So I've done this a number of times but I actually completely redid these slides just today. So this is going to be a fun one. I picked a few kind of more what I'll just call relevant highlights but we're going to look over essentially the past 100 years. I'll point out a few different resources that we use and show you what some of the changes are. And then I do hope to stick to the schedule and then be able to hang on for some questions at the end. So we'll dive right in. I think I have to put this slide in contractually obligated to. I know a lot of people find themselves associated with Maine Audubon in different ways but I do just like to make sure everyone is aware that we are the statewide organization. We really appreciate and depend on our chapters that work especially at this local level. And very thankful for all the programs especially these still being able to do things on Zoom for now but certainly bird walks and things like that will be starting up. But good to know that as a chapter member you're still a part of Maine Audubon doing our mission to conserve Maine's wildlife and wildlife habitats. As we always say tripod is the most sturdy object any birders should know that with their what they want to put their scope on. And so a tripod you know the tripod of Maine Audubon the three legs that it stands on would be education conservation and advocacy. So I as the staff naturalist work in our education department which is why I get to do things like be here and present to groups. I wanted to make a special a call out especially for some of our conservation work that's going on. I'll highlight some of it in tonight's talk but especially for Laura Zitski who's on the that middle picture here. Hopefully you can see my cursor but right now I know she is incredibly busy out on Maine's sandy beaches doing work to help our piping clovers which again we'll talk about in a little bit but it's it's setting up things like those exposures that you can see putting those around nests to keep predators and people away. It's really important work and then of course our advocacy always make a plug for you can sign up for Maine Audubon's action alerts and learn about ways that you can kind of be involved on the advocacy side. And again all the work that we do is really thanks to our membership we are a member-based organization so hopefully you're already there Maine Audubon or York County Audubon member fall into the same umbrella but if not please consider joining and trying to support the work we do. I wanted to start by mentioning some of my favorite resources see if this video plays. To go back birds of Maine by aura night 1908 this wonderful old relic I think they only did 500 copies the first printing and it's remarkable what night was able to do especially for that time frame doing a great job kind of breaking down different species all around the state and really breaking them down by county and saying kind of where they were essentially what their populations were like. What is it 40 or so years later 1949 Ralph Palmer wrote Maine birds which was a great update to tonight's birds of Maine. Palmer was kind of more of a hunter I feel like you could you could tell there's a little more emphasis on some of the game birds and things that's the rough grouse on the on the cover but we are very fortunate even a year ago this would be a different talk because we now have Peter Vickery's birds of Maine. Sorry this is some video I should operate the unboxing video like I did last year but an absolutely beautiful thing unfortunately Peter Vickery passed away before the completion of the book so we have people to thank like his wife Barbara Vickery and Scott Weedon salt took over as a managing editors but then Charles Duncan Bill Sheehan and Jeff Wells stepped in to kind of help finish writing these these species accounts and I'll strongly encourage like I'm sure in the Q&A we're probably just going to have lots of questions about you know well what about this species what about this species and I'll answer as many as I can but this is kind of the value of this book you can see the the opening chapter is kind of talk about conservation work and some of the changes here in Maine and then beyond that as we'll get into in a second as I keep flipping there are actually these species accounts so good to know this is not a field guide it's not going to be good for you know helping you identify birds but if you want to know about their status in the state historically this is really the the best resource out there it's it's and it just came out as I said last November I think it's the publication date so highly recommend it wonderful resource that we have now so as we talk about changes in in birds I do think it's really important to go back this was a paper that came out in the fall of 2019 that really was one of the the most comprehensive reports that basically showed what's happened to our birds unfortunately we've lost about three billion birds since the 1970s which and I should make the the clear distinction that these are from the breeding bird population so I'll use some we'll use some numbers in a little bit when we talk about like annual mortality rates and you'll see especially when we're talking about billions I feel like it's very hard to kind of almost wrap your head around it sometimes anyways three billion birds.org is a website that was started to kind of help with a bit of the spreading the word getting education out about this but it's really quite alarming some of the findings a lot of this was was using a lot of databases citizen science community science projects like breeding bird surveys Christmas bird counts now more recently we have things like e-bird so we'll use some of those resources as I go through tonight's talk but this is kind of a really good way to point out at least in North America what's happening with some of our birds so again looking at the breeding population of birds we know that in terms of the all birds that are out there we'll break these down into some groups in a little bit we've lost about just under three billion birds since since the 70s which again if you think about it from a complete population standpoint it's about one in four which is insane to think about some birds are doing better than others and and bear with me in a minute we'll kind of dive into you know specifically in Maine and look at some of these but especially where Maine has kind of a really good diversity of habitats and a really remarkable number of birds that come here we have over 200 species of birds that breed in the state a lot of them are migratory birds that are coming here from central wintering in central and south america coming all the way here to breed so it's a little unfortunate to see that things like our you know Baltimore Orioles again two and five we've lost since the 70s 28 population decline in these migratory birds grassland birds are certainly not not doing great it's an interesting one to look at in Maine we don't have a ton of grasslands but the few that we do especially farms tend to be going away so even here in Maine grassland birds even though we don't have a ton of them they're not faring well our boreal forest birds Maine actually has one of the largest chunks of boreal forest for any state most of it of course go to canada and that's that's where you find the the boreal forest but um Maine has kind of a big responsibility for the boreal birds in in terms of the states here and and we're unfortunately seeing them uh not only declining but retreating out of the state as they move northward um and then just to say yes of course Maine our Maine is going to make up a lot of the eastern forest birds and then aerial insectivores are one that are just sharply declining now I don't want this to be all super negative so it's it's good to point out we will talk about a lot of the conservation success stories that are out there um or especially here in Maine um but it's it's fun to look at this and see that some families of birds are doing okay um raptors we'll talk about a couple tonight um woodpeckers are an interesting one thanks to conservation work and and especially um uh allowing more mature trees um they're doing quite well and then waterfowl is a great example of um uh when you do things like conserve land and and put bag limits on game species um they've been really well managed to the point that they've made huge population gains um and a lot of that is thanks to really thanks to hunters um the the federal duck stamp program has has uh um led to the purchase of a remarkable amount of wetlands and of course the great conservation um that comes from that so one of the most alarming things that came out of this report that I feel like wasn't quite talked about enough so I want to touch on it here is that we know so waterfowl had a nice population increase um less than 40 percent of or excuse me less than 50 of all the waterfowl species did have a good increase so that's great fortunately waterfowl or excuse me water birds like our our herons declined a lot of the land birds so think of things like those those grassland birds would be in this group shorebirds declining and what really struck me is to see that are introduced our our non-native mostly invasive species also had huge population change declines since the 70s um which we tend to think of them as you know always thriving and and being everywhere uh displacing a lot of our natives so like they're probably having a bad impact on well they are having a bad impact on some of our native nesting species but um to know that they're also not fearing that well probably points to some larger uh problems that are out there especially when we start thinking about you know uh things like the food chain we know that the number of insects is is sharply declining and that's most likely what's affecting things like um you know from our rock pigeons our european starlings um even though they they tend to nest just about everywhere unfortunately starlings are taking over cavities that a lot of other especially secondary cavity nesters would be using in Maine um uh it's not helping now one invasive species uh that we know is is doing all right uh coming to a backyard near you is the Eurasian collared dove um still quite rare in Maine but uh i'm gonna go through we'll do this fairly quickly um let's look at some maps uh and this is in a short time frame we're gonna go through uh i feel like now the the more i do this talk it it just makes me feel older and older i guess uh because i like to go we're gonna go through my lifetime uh going back to 1988 when uh when i was born where were Eurasian collared doves and and we're gonna look at uh e bird e bird dot org it's a community science project run by the Cornell lab of our own anthology that asks people to report what birds they see what and where and with how much effort and then they can use that information to create uh well a lot of products but one of the cool ones are maps like this and now e bird does not date back it's it was really only in the um kind of earlier 2000s that e bird uh well started and then really got popular just in the last 10 years but people you can go in because it's a database you can submit old sightings and obviously people have been birding for a long time this has really become the um the repository of almost all uh bird records um except for ones that use use different uh sampling methods but so anyways what we can see is at least you know even in the 80s uh all of this grayed out area just means that there were checklist submitted so we have data from really all over and now where we start to see these pinks and purples showing up are where Eurasian collared doves were reported and so this the varying shades of uh pink to purple I guess is uh frequency so what percentage of the checklist included that species on it so it's important to note that all the Eurasian collared doves as the name implies Eurasian Eurasia they're an old world species they should not be here in really anywhere in North America the New World um but they pretty much all came from a population in the West Indies um forget exactly which island it was now but there's basically a captive population that I believe was a hurricane that destroyed an aviary allowing these birds to escape and then as they started spreading they came up through the keys to Florida and we'll see I know you're all holding your breath to see this map but um we'll start in 1988 this will jump two years at a time so uh here we go uh Doug is born collared doves just starting to show up in the U.S. uh we'll move ahead I'm going into elementary school middle school high school uh into college started working for me in Audubon I guess um and oh sorry I guess uh missing one somewhere uh so here we are uh present day just about this cut off in 2018 um to see that in you know just over 30 years the species has now spread um and really taken over the country this is um this is not good um they they spread up the west coast and then are now kind of filling in towards the east so uh we do know they're they're coming this was Maine's first record in May of 2013 when showed up in Falmouth actually right across the road from Maine Audubon's headquarters uh in Falmouth Hills on farm so kind of you know nice that it didn't show up on our property um but of course as crazy birders we all ran over to see it um and then uh uh just a couple years ago 2019 um one showed up out on Monhegan Island popular birding site for for folks um and interestingly that bird hung around for weeks and as you can see in this picture it's it's inflating it's uh uh it's throat here it was singing a lot so that was a bird with with breeding on its mind um so we'll talk a lot about breeding birds here as as Bill teased at the beginning and they're gonna try to be slipping in a lot about the main bird atlas which is all about um documenting breeding birds in the state so it's good that we don't have Eurasian collardubs here yet they'll probably out compete some of our native species they'll certainly take resources um and interestingly there's a big spread of um uh apparently an increase in Cooper's hawk populations anywhere that these birds go you can think of doves as just one of the the best food sources out there they've got a lot of doves are really strong flyers this is kind of why you know people love um unfortunately things like passenger pigeons were such a good meal because doves and pigeons um tend to have really big uh um breast muscles which makes for good eating so if you're Cooper's hawk here's an abundant food source now and and unfortunately with more Cooper's hawk so start um going after her birds as well it is worth mentioning um so Eurasian collardubs are they were kept in captivity have escaped and now spread and are super common we actually get a lot of reports of escaped birds in Maine which is is kind of funny to to think about um a little unfortunate that these are basically pets that that escaped but um you know every now and then we get reports of you know folks who think that they have Eurasian collardubs um this was a bird that was in South Portland a few years ago October 2017 um I went uh I hung out in their backyard um and sure enough you can see it's they look a little different they're very similar birds um but this is actually uh the species is African collardove um but the more the colloquial name that they're usually known as is the turtle dove ringed turtle dove so this was someone's pet you can even see it's got a band on its leg so hopefully it uh eventually gets uh reconnected with its with its owner now why I this seems like a funny group of birds to be talking about but when we think about Maine's history it's kind of a fun one to look at other birds that have funny origins um house finches which especially in southern Maine I know most people in the chat said that they were uh in york county which is york county Audubon talk um house finches have a very interesting history in Maine especially the northeast they were introduced here they are essentially a non-native species they're native to north america but house finches um were first introduced in new york in 1939 uh so before that you could you would walk into a store and you could buy a house finch they were called hollywood finches um because they came from places like california um unfortunately uh it's through that introduction in new york in uh 1939 they then started to spread um they're not quite as they're they're really not invasive so we don't quite talk about them the same way that we do things like house sparrows good to make that distinction how sparrows are the other um european non-native species that that were also first introduced in new york the second place house sparrows were introduced in the us was actually portland maine which is a funny bit of trivia um but anyways house finches native to north america not native to new england or the northeast new york um they spread here and first showed up in maine in 1966 uh actually in cape nettock was the first place that they were found um so a little insert uh in that peter vickery's book birds of maine that came out last year um this is why you should buy it there's some awesome uh things like these maps that they put together to kind of show some of these changes so here's house finches and kind of a couple nice snapshots of how they've expanded um and worth noting so this is showing in 66 to 72 that's kind of where they uh again in cape nettock where they were first found i guess down here and then started breeding kind of through coastal york um and southern southern cumberland county excuse me um from 78 to 83 we'll talk about this um the atlas of breeding birds of maine so they had really expanded quite a bit since then and now this is just showing in the 2010s and from may to july which is their breeding season again how they continue to expand and again that is just the the breeding season you can see them certainly even further north from there and that's a fun segue uh to a species that's now incredibly common uh through especially southern maine uh the southern half of the state um northern cardinals but it's a fun one to point out again in this using the funny segue of introduced or non-native species where cardinals not that long ago were not here so going back to ralph palmers uh birds of maine from 1949 at that time so 1949 not that long ago he wrote that there were a couple records of cardinals in maine but his he presumed that they were all more likely to be escaped pets which again like cardinal beautiful you know bright red bird they have a wonderful song people used to keep them as pets um fortunately but uh yeah even in 1949 palmer was saying that their the maines records were more likely escaped pets than naturally occurring vagrants because it was just a more southern species at that time it only took 20 years after that and we'll see uh 1949 there's some funny changes that really started happening especially in the 50s when we start talking about climate change in a little bit um where a number of species started expanding their ranges northward and by 1969 we had northern cardinals now breeding in the state so not just you know uh vagrants showing up but here established as breeders which is a nice segue to uh talk about the maine bird atlas um the maine bird atlas is a project by being run by the main department of inland fisheries and wildlife um i always love pointing this out because uh uh so many people associate if and w with especially game species you know a lot of hunting activities fishing um but they are here to protect all of maine's wildlife and this is a i think an especially a great way of them kind of putting their money where their mouth is if we wanted to put it that way um but doing a very important project to um work with essentially all birds all species of birds that are in the state of maine so i um one of the many hats i wear uh uh through maine autobahn we were hired to do the um outreach for the for the atlas so here i am reaching out to you all um about it so it's a five-year project it started in 2018 um and we're basically trying to document what birds are breeding and wintering but we'll focus on the breeding portion um for tonight what birds are are breeding across the state and so we'll we'll look at some of those maps in a second i mentioned this with the house finch when we saw that map um from 1978 to 83 was the first time that of uh breeding atlas had been done in the state there were 201 species confirmed at the time um in 14 of those had not previously been documented in the state so really cool effort um and it's fun to now be able to look at their results look at the results that we're seeing now there are these two you know really good snapshots in time and see some of the changes that that are occurring we still have a couple years left in our atlas so i'll make a plug towards the end here um but it's fun to look at some of these maps and see some of the changes like cardinals by again 78 to 83 to think that they had just started breeding in main in 1969 you can see what a rapid expansion they did especially in kind of uh suburban areas now here's our current map um sorry bank uh there should be a key on here that has apparently gone away but um a little different from the frequency maps that we saw before um the darkest shades of purple almost black is where they are confirmed breeding uh the the true purple we want to call it that are probable records lighter shade is possible and then these pinks are just where they've only been observed so um a really fun thing this is a little teaser you're the first people that get to see this if you come to a talk tomorrow that I'll plug um this is some of the the final maps that we're going to be producing again preliminary this is only two years or excuse me three years worth of data um but we're being able to produce some really cool maps showing the change um you can see quite a bit of change um and for the first time we can actually we'll have density maps for the the state of Maine so really get to see where these species are so northern cardinals nice increase in them another species that's uh benefiting quite well as I mentioned earlier uh with especially thanks to main autobahn's uh seabird crew out there piping clovers are going through just uh kind of having wonderful nesting success lately uh breaking records literally every year so um last year we were just shy I think it was 199 chicks that were fledged off main beaches um coming from just under 100 pairs in the state so this is wonderful to see um especially after there had been this this little dip there was really high predation um back in the early 2000s there's uh especially a lot of things like skunks, raccoons, boxes that were showing up at beaches and and um becoming quite a problem but through using things like exposures even some electric fences and areas um uh getting better control um unfortunately this number can probably only go so high and so here the entire state of Maine here's the key I wanted to show you before if we look at the main bird analyst results for piping clovers these uh and I should mention uh the state's broken up into about 4,080 blocks and those blocks are the they're they're three by three miles um and that's kind of the the survey size that we're using for the atlas so to think that our entire population of piping clovers are just in this tiny area a lot of it in York County um glad that they're having such success but they've uh they're going to have some some problems at some point um again the the the issues they only nest on sandy beaches and Maine has a very uh bold coast if you don't mind um stealing that phrase from from down east Maine we tend to have a lot of rocky uh rocky beaches they like sand one of the greatest conservation success stories in Maine um some people would argue it's too much of a success uh is our wild turkey um now almost everywhere you go you can find these adorable little polts in the summer and into the fall um polt is the name of the the chicks and fun to look at it again 1978 to 83 here's where they were uh I got the date already um it was not that long before this atlas the first atlas that wild turkeys were extirpated from the state they had actually been over hunted there was no regulation on things like bag limits and and it's hard to think that you could just hunt a species to to local extinction um so I wouldn't be surprised if it probably also had to do with things like the habitat changing maybe even disease at some point but the state uh decided to reintroduce turkeys they went to Vermont caught turkeys reintroduced them here and you can see basically in York County and then in the mid-coast area where these little black dots are that's the only places that wild turkeys were confirmed breeding again from 78 to 83 now look at them they're everywhere they're literally in every single county how they've made it up over some of these uh especially the the mountain ranges to end up in um Piscataquus County is is remarkable um so wow what a great success for them um another remarkable success in the the state of Maine is just bald eagles especially you know Charlie Todd at Maine IF and W has done so much um his aerial surveys that really helped fill in some of the maps for our results it's a fun one again looking just how they've changed in the last few decades um really you know mostly down east before only a few inland but now look at all across the state and remarkably inland um they're now confirmed breeding all over um to the point that they're actually becoming a bit of a problem um because there's a lot of other species that nest uh where these eagles are as well um actually just realize it looks like there's a band done in that one um anyway so for things like cormorants uh specifically our great cormorant uh there are two species of cormorants that nest in the state of Maine um we have our slightly smaller very common double crested cormorants which are just starting to arrive back I just saw my first ones of the year about a week or two ago um great cormorants will will spend the winters in Maine and we're on the southern edge of their breeding range and so where you're on the edges where they you know populations tend not to to do so well but especially when you have things like eagles that love picking cormorant chicks out of their nest um it's really causing quite a problem um this is a younger one uh that's why it's got the white belly that's not um usually white in the throat yellow on the what we call the goolier pouch uh versus the burnt orange color here um anyways they're down to about two islands uh that our great cormorants are are still nesting on which is really not good uh peregrine falcons uh as we mentioned you know uh so we can lump kind of with the the bald eagles having great comeback uh peregrine falcons as well ospreys as well um a lot of that is because of how low their populations were before it was uh was that 60s into the 70s when DDT was being so uh widely used um the insecticide that through bio accumulation caused the thinning of eggshells in a lot of our our raptors um and really unfortunately wiped them out so good thing we're not using DDT anymore i think the us still exports it which is a absolute disgrace um but it can't be used here and we're seeing our birds benefiting from it uh so now we've got peregrine falcons nesting you know certainly not as as dense they have very specific habitat requirements say like uh rocky cliffs and things but um now quite a few of them breeding in the state it's worth mentioning that some birds have not really uh come back from things like the the arrow of DDT um logger head strikes are species that used to breed in the northeast not to be confused with our northern strikes northern strikes are uh more northern nesting species that do come south to Maine in the winter um but we used to have logger head strikes that would breed in the state so here's from uh again the the older birds of Maine um where uh you know they were listed in Andrew Scoggin as a you know rare summer resident um where was it here uh washington new york a rare migrant um yeah this is what drives me nuts you know westbrook gorum um i guess only seeing in the all but anyways lost my notes here but they they were nesting in the state and now we haven't had one in the last they're not even being seen at all really i think only like one or two records in the last decade um but no breeding it makes me kind of wonder what are we going to lose next um unfortunately i think it's going to be one of my favorite birds this is uh called salt marsh sparrow they nest as the name implies in our salt marshes um when i was working at the scarver marsh years ago um i used to help with this uh this demographic study um so for for three years we'd go out super early set up nets try to catch the bird so you can see it's got these bands on it unique markers and we would do things like find nests take blood samples etc um it's worth noting we have salt marsh sparrows and nelson sparrows so nelson sparrows do also breed in in the same habitats they're even hybridizing um but nelson's also have some interior populations across uh north america so um even though we don't want to lose them here in main um the fact that salt marsh sparrows are only in salt marshes is what's not going to help it's especially bad because they nest they make these cup nests low in the marsh that get flooded during high tides so they have to um and i should say during the the astronomical or um uh what is the word for that the spring high tide the highest high tide of each month will literally flood their nests so they have to nest between high tide cycles um which is very short window and unfortunately it's getting shorter because of sea level rise um it is a more complicated thing than that it's it's not only sea level rise but um the barriers we've now put through salt marshes so roads um bridges are not adequate uh culverts are not large enough um it's unfortunately all compounding to be quite a problem so since the 1990s not that long ago uh their population is decline about 75 percent um so the current estimate their entire population is around nine percent lost annually um main's actually even a little bit higher than that um and it's terrible uh there there's some predictions that by 2050 which is right around the corner um that by 2050 uh we could lose these birds back on a more positive note woodpeckers um oh sorry if any of you can use this video woodpeckers are doing great uh as a hairy woodpecker red-bellied woodpeckers a fun example of a species that um you know again kind of new to Maine uh you look at even field guides from like the 80s and they weren't here they were barely in New England now this video is from uh from Gilson farm just a couple years ago we've got them breeding here on loop it's not uh constant viewing trips um but yeah here we are again in the 80s they were barely in New England not at all reported during the first breeding atlas in the state but now um here's our key uh now we've got them breeding all the way up you know just north of of Waterville uh remarkable range expansion they've gone through it's fun to look at nearby states who have also completed atlases again it's by completing that second atlas that you can do things like compare and get these wonderful you know changes that have occurred so interesting to see that also across mass uh almost every single block that had had them breeding in the second atlas only a couple blocks that did they have them in their first atlas uh I hope I don't need to convince anyone in this audience that climate change is a real thing but red-bellied woodpeckers in your backyard now breeding here in Maine is the perfect example and there's this wonderful study that uh looked at red-bellied woodpeckers and showed that they followed what's called Bergman's rule so it's this ecogeographical principle that says across a species range the further you go from the equator the more mass that species will have so the red-bellied woodpeckers down here in Florida were a little bit smaller maybe not actually in length as I tried to illustrate here um if you can see that uh but certainly mass they they were they weighed less um because if it's warmer you don't need as much mass to survive so 1950 again kind of the time that we know co2 was being dumped in really high quantities especially through industrialization um what the study did was look at red-bellied woodpeckers in their distribution between nine before 1950 by going into things like museum collections um any records of like banded birds and found this nice distribution of less mass more mass they did this study in 2010 did the same thing as people who were you know banding birds anyone who could take measurements for them and then looked at how was that spread of the red-bellied woodpeckers um broken up as well and what they found were that in places like Maine uh New England uh we had the red-bellied woodpeckers with more mass again helps to survive uh you know maybe that's why manors we tend to be a little bit heftier than some of those people down south but more interestingly in some place like New Jersey they found that the red-bellied woodpeckers that were there in 1950 had more mass than the ones that are there now the only way that you can have the same species occurring in the same area but with less mass over time is if the climate has gotten warmer there so red-bellied woodpeckers a great example of this Carolina Wren is another species that we know is expanding in strange northward because of climate change this is looking at Christmas bird count data so you probably hear about usually in late December um York County helps host a couple counts in the state um Carolina Wrens are one that that tends to be reported a lot this year we had a record number uh of them reported it's been we've had a few mild winters but what's interesting is that we're on the northern edge of their range they're more southern species and every now and then they get knocked back so this um what was this the winter of 20 I think it was the 2013 into 14 pardon me I had too many dates um we had a really bad cold and incredibly deep snowed winter uh if folks remember this was in I think February where we had back to back to back nor'easters that each dropped literally feet of snow um and that made things like especially food too hard to find for for these birds so you'd see it really knocked back their northern population and then eastern bluebirds are another one that are just kind of uh uh while we've known them for a long time to be breeders in the state uh they're now over wintering in really large numbers again kind of a more recent phenomenon this is just looking at Christmas bird count data and I should make the point this is I've been showing raw numbers because it'll make more sense to us um but if you a better measure would have been birds per party hour just to make sure that it's not just biased by the amount of uh effort the amount of people or time that goes into it uh I know it'd be easy to look at this and say like oh birding's become much more popular in the last 20 years like there's just more people seeing them but but if you divide the number of birds by the amount of effort it follows the exact same path so looking at birds per party hour would help um take care of that and trust me the the same pattern is there um but it's I think it's a lot easier for us to to visualize or conceptualize 617 uh eastern bluebirds in main last winter versus me saying like oh 2.567 uh birds per party hour uh one of the uh uh last examples I'll just show um we still think of red wing blackbirds as kind of a uh migrant a true herald of spring um but they're changing uh again with with climate change what we're seeing is they're starting to arrive earlier this is one of the messiest charts I've ever made and um I wanted to show it here because this is just a great example of like something we're actually seeing changing and you can kind of see with with varying years they're showing up earlier and earlier again this is frequency um what percentage of checklists are they reported on um certainly some years uh you know it it sways a little um back and forth but if you can uh hopefully not go blind looking at this here's the trend um this is going back you know 1999 um you can see some of the first arrivals were kind of by mid march um every now and then we get these weird you know not great data going back this far so these weird spikes but there's clearly this trend of some of the first arrivals um going from mid march in 2000 in the early 2000s to you know early march um you can really see you know almost this you could draw a line here and as soon as I do a little more statistics homework or something I'll I'll make a better chart for you guys um but to see that 2020 last year was the first year that we had red wing blackbirds reported every single week of the year somewhere in the state of Maine um versus you know these larger gaps if not months at a time so it's changing with the last uh minute or so here um I just want to make a few recommendations of what are some things you can do to help birds we've we've covered a lot um wins and losses but there's some kind of very simple things that we all can do either as consumers as conservationists as uh whatever level uh uh of a bird appreciator you are um there's things that you can do one very important thing um we didn't talk a lot about birds outside of what they're doing outside of Maine here but um for so many of these species that are coming to Maine to breed if we think back one of those first charts I showed are um the migratory species that we've lost I think it was 28 percent of their population um a lot of those are going to spend the winters in and I should say neotropic migrants so spending the winters in Central America northern part of South America maybe the West Indies um which tends to be where a lot of our coffee comes from so if you are a coffee drinker the best thing that you can do um at least from a uh uh um what's the word not economic but from a um financial contributions I guess I'll say as a consumer the the best thing that you can do is switch to being to drinking shade grown coffee which is grown in uh essentially good bird habitat rather than uh places that are just cleared uh so that the coffee grow is faster and can meet our demand so look for this bird friendly Smithsonian certification uh and do a little more research if you're if you're really curious about it for the sake of time I'm going to keep clicking uh planting native plants and avoiding pesticide use uh is is really critical as we saw um a lot of those declines are probably connected with a lack of food that's around and that important food for a lot of our nesting birds are things like caterpillars a lot of insects the lepidopter larva the caterpillars of moths butterflies and what they need is native plants that is the bottom of the food chain uh native plants feed those native insects which gives us our next generation of the birds keep your cats indoors uh build beamy to the the punch earlier um the thing about this is there's so many things that we can do um we can plant natives we can buy shade grown coffee we can um you know put stickers on our windows to to cut back on declines but it's 2.4 billion birds per year in the U.S. that are killed by outdoor cats and a lot of those are also just owned cats these are not just feral cats these are outdoor owned cats they are surplus killers so it doesn't matter if you feed them they're still going to kill birds when they can and just to compare like this is insane to see if you try to you know pick your battles um cats are by far the number one worst thing out there um if you own a cat please keep it indoors they are a non-native uh pet that we brought from the the fertile crescent back in the day because they were so good at killing mice that were eating our basically when we started uh uh our wonderful history with agriculture and started growing plants or excuse me cultivating plants and trying to store food uh rodents started eating our food and we noticed that cats would eat the rodents so then as we started spreading uh especially through ports around the world we brought cats with us and we humans have introduced cats all over the world bringing this apex predator with us there's no reason that we should um allow this billions of birds to be killed annually again that is contributing to the loss of uh that that uh three billion number are those breeding birds so to think that we're pulling out this huge chunk annually that's going just being killed just by cats um these ridiculous become a community scientist uh so we've been looking at things like e bird if you say uh birds are really not that you know for me um there are great projects like iNaturalist there's also ways to be involved uh i want to make the final plug we've like hopefully just sprinkled in uh things about the atlas um one of the most important things for getting the atlas done is having lots of coverage good statewide coverage um um right now we know that we're doing a good job with uh finding out where birds are where people are so here's our our effort map right now that the darkest blocks are what we would call complete we need about 20 hours of effort in a block for it to be considered complete we know we won't get the entire state done but we've identified what we call priority blocks and if i can just pick on york county for a second since i know that's where most people are well maybe i apologize if it's hard to see on your screen but where uh some of these blocks have a little um border around them those are priority blocks so everyone's done a great job kind of you know here's scarborough marsh somewhere up here we're doing a great job along the coast but there are a ton of these interior priority blocks in york county that are not getting touched and to think that york county has the second largest population in the state um we need people to leave you know go away from your uh you know we all have our favorite places to go birding but the success of this project we we need good statewide coverage um in these priority blocks and just 20 hours worth of effort uh over the next couple years it'll add up quickly so check out um actually tomorrow night we will record these so if you can't make it uh you can always watch them but we're doing a our 2021 season kickoff meeting in we'll be wrapping up in 24 hours uh but go on main.gov slash bird atlas uh you can register right here it is it is free but just to get the link that's how you'll do it um and this will be fun we're gonna have uh we'll do a little intro and then have beginner intermediate and uh expert breakout sessions so even if you're brand new to it you just started thinking like wow I kind of want to know what Doug was rambling about so quickly in that little uh time that he had um join us tomorrow or or again watch this later on and then every week after that we'll be doing uh zoom sessions on or q and a sessions on zoom so you can always get involved and join in and find out uh ways to help with that project with that thank you so much um I will stop screen sharing I saw I haven't been able to look at them but it looks like a couple questions might have popped up um be right with you Doug yeah um and sorry if I didn't fully uh it and just say um thank you everyone for for uh listening to me yeah get so much out in in the last hour I'm very appreciative of uh your county Audubon also asking me to uh do this talk um obviously something I'm passionate about and I always want to do whatever I can to help people realize the the value um that birds provide to us and and kind of all sorts of different ways and I think we we owe it to them um to uh to give back and and the main bird Alice is going to um if I didn't get this point across before a lot of the the conservation decisions for main birds will be decided from the results of that we'll we'll use that to say like oh my gosh look at aerial insectivores have declined this much in the state like let's do something about it kestrels how are they doing um so we need to we need this to be a success so that we have good data to make those decisions what what can we do about kestrels put up boxes um unfortunately you know the kestrels are secondary cavity nesters so they like nesting in holes that are made by other species um so woodpeckers especially we think of woodpeckers as primary cavity nesters they've got the beats to to make those holes um a woodpecker will nest one year and then essentially um sometimes they come back but most years they're they're going to make a new cavity every year so this there's this whole suite of secondary cavity nesters that then move in um kestrels being one of them um and so instead of waiting for a woodpecker to come in and you know make a cavity and then maybe in a future year kestrel could use it um putting up a large they usually use the same size boxes like a wood duck box is what a lot of people find online um and you can even you know try reaching out uh in the the towns you live in um there's a lot of areas that uh uh people are trying to just install uh kestrel boxes along telephone poles which are kind of a wonderful um uh almost a naturally occurring um they they're natural and that humans put them all along roads which tend to be near large open areas or kestrels nests but um that would be a great thing to do to help yeah that sounds like a good project for us we have a few questions uh one person uh Gina Stevens asking about woodcock in Maine um what's the distribution are they pretty much throughout the entire state or yeah um so it's funny I have I almost put there a map for them in here um because I've been showing off lately with with the atlas as a great example of um uh I briefly mentioned there there's possible probable and confirmed codes for the atlas um woodcocks are really hard to confirm as breeders because you usually have to find either their nest or their young but one of the best things that we can do with with woodcocks is get a probable code which is when you you know go out in the evening and you hear them doing their aerial displays peeping on the ground which is singing but then displaying up in the air and they're actually all over the state and the best example of this is um uh um for getting uh oh my gosh um so Jeff Cherry and um so named Kathy um we've got two volunteers in the mid-coast area who are basically taking it upon themselves to can to get a probable woodcock record in every single block near them and it's if you look at the woodcock map it's just this giant swath of purple because they have been going out every evening you basically just have to find a um kind of a open field if it's a little wet that helps and if it's got some woods on the border so they'll tend to nest in the woods but they'll come out in the fields because they're a lacking species so they'll do their display while the females are watching um but that example of those two volunteers basically they they found in every single block in Lincoln County I think now maybe there's a couple they're missing but they're everywhere there's so much more abundant than I think we we realize another question about uh well specifically about woodpeckers but about species and bird species in general uh the impact of the emerald ash borer on uh boreal species and others yeah um so I'll say the the the best answer I'll give is I don't know um that connection I've I've never heard of a connection with emerald ash borers to the success of woodpeckers coming back uh the way I've heard it is that it's it's mostly thanks to kind of changes in forestry practices so especially the way that we don't do clear cutting uh like we used to um you know when you think about like the fact that there's virtually no virgin forest left you know in the state of Maine like we were it was cut over um and so that's true for a lot of areas so um uh I've always heard the success of woodpeckers mostly because of the the changes in some of some of our forestry practices uh and ash borers are killing a lot of trees woodpeckers like dead trees that you know have uh boring insects so I bet there's there's probably a little correlation but um maybe a fun one to look at I don't I don't know yeah what could you elaborate a little on the specific uses that the bird atlas results can be will be put to I mean obviously you'll identify will it be uh areas where it's important more important to uh protect land through LMF for example yeah um uh so the best answer is you know the the interesting thing will be what does this uncover um so you know we have already in the state you know I have an W is in charge of keeping track of what species are listed so you know who's endangered who's threatened um then there are the species of special concern um so most likely like the the what all bet not and and I'll quickly admit you know as the outreach coordinator uh my involvement you know will be uh a little different than um some of the biologists that will be that would be brought into make some of these decisions but what will most likely happen is that with our results when we can show the things like um a lot of our our swallows especially um uh bank and cliff swallows are just disappearing um especially when you look at they were everywhere they were all over the place in the first atlas now there's a few places that they're still nesting um step one will be elevating those things to either species of concern getting them actually listed as as threatened um could actually would be a good way to then help um uh you you never want a species to be listed is maybe an important thing that's kind of uh a bit of a last resort but um then that's what really helps kind of get the attention um so when you start thinking about things like the amount of funding which of course is a finite resource um if we can say like we're we're going to lose this species unless something is done um this will be kind of some of the the results to it again I hope it's not that dire right but uh how many species are listed as endangered and threatened in Maine now and what's the how long does it take for what's the process for a bird to get added to that status um so right now uh I don't know the actual number off the top of my head but I'll you know if there's um probably around 30 or less uh total species of birds that are both um some combination of threatened or endangered a lot of those are a lot of our seabirds um so we mentioned uh uh what did I mention um but some of the things like razor bills are listed um which are just you know not not common breeders um yeah the great cormorant um black crown night herons are listed species some of our turns especially rosie at least turns the piping clovers are the ones that we mentioned um there's some kind of odd species that are listed in Maine um I believe American tippet is it's because uh they there's only one known nesting site uh up on Mount Kutahden it's the only kind of proper habitat for them so very important to preserve that um and I'll quit then I don't know the full process you usually have to show there's there's there's a metric that basically looks at what the decline is kind of over I think it's over a certain time frame so like as I showed the the salt marsh sparrow is an interesting example of like they um they haven't been listed yet on the state level but I think they were about to be listed on the federal level but if you think about the last four years of um environmental protection work in the the US there's not a lot of effort to get species listed um hopefully uh we'll be making some more progress on that right well thank you very much for your presentation tonight uh thank you to everyone for joining us hope you can join us next month and also uh check out the bird atlas launch program tomorrow night which will also be available for subsequent streaming through the main.gov bird atlas location uh so thank you very much hope you all can get out birding soon and enjoy the migrants that are streaming our way and so good night everyone thank you everyone good night you