Some hummingbirds have been showing up in places where they're not normally found. Cornell University is trying to recruit birders to help them collect sightings of birds outside their range. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
Bird lovers nationwide are being asked to report “vagrants” in their neighborhoods. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner explains:
Transcript
Bird lovers nationwide are being asked to report “vagrants” in their neighborhoods. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner explains:
Bird researchers at Cornell University have a special request this winter: they’re asking their nationwide network of bird watchers to report vagrants – birds that show up in places they’re not normally found. David Bonter is head of Project FeederWatch at Cornell.
He says birds that drift outside their normal range can indicate a natural shift in bird distribution or it could be a sign there’s a problem with the species. Bonter says in recent years, there have been a lot of reports of hummingbirds that breed west of the Rocky Mountains showing up at feeders in the Southeast and Midwest.
“These are birds that, historically, have never been in Eastern North America and they’re showing up here at feeders in the winter time, when historically, they’d be wintering in Mexico or points south.”
Bonter says calls bird vagrancy a biological dead end, because most don’t find mates in their new environment.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Erin Toner.