Many coffee growers in Latin America are now replanting the shade trees. (Source: MarkSweep at Wikimedia Commons)
Songbirds on their way south might
find more trees at coffee plantations. Lester
Graham reports there’s a shift in thinking by
coffee growers. And a new study might encourage
more farmers to plant shade trees:
Transcript
Songbirds on their way south might
find more trees at coffee plantations. Lester
Graham reports there’s a shift in thinking by
coffee growers. And a new study might encourage
more farmers to plant shade trees:
A few decades ago, coffee growers in Latin America were given incentives to clear the
shade trees on their plantations. More sun equals more coffee beans. They also found
more sun meant more weeds. So they had to spray expensive herbicides.
Now a new study published in BioScience shows cutting down those shade trees has
also left the coffee plants more exposed to damage from bad weather. Ivette Perfecto
at the University of Michigan is one of the authors.
“The vulnerability of the farms are much higher if they eliminate the shade. The shade
trees provide like a buffer against extremes.”
Many coffee growers in Latin America are now replanting the shade trees. The added
benefit is the trees provide habitat for wildlife, including those migrating birds that spend
their summers here and travel south to that region.
For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.
Ken Brunswick at the Limberlost marsh (Photo by Sam Hendren)
The Limberlost marsh was written about by Gene Stratton-Porter, a
popular novelist in the early 1900s. Stratton-
Porter was best known for her fictional accounts
set in and around an the swamp. (Photo by Sam Hendren)
A red-winged blackbird at the Limberlost marsh (Photo by Sam Hendren)
Biologists say we’ve lost about half
of the number of songbirds we had just 50 years
ago. Part of the reason is the loss of habitat.
Many birds need wetlands. Sam Hendren has the
story of one man’s love of those birds and his
work to save their home:
Transcript
Biologists say we’ve lost about half
of the number of songbirds we had just 50 years
ago. Part of the reason is the loss of habitat.
Many birds need wetlands. Sam Hendren has the
story of one man’s love of those birds and his
work to save their home:
When Ken Brunswick was a kid, he wanted
to study birds. Brunswick grew up near the
western Ohio town of St. Henry in the 1950s. He
says it didn’t take long to read all the books
about birds in the local library.
“I knew exactly where all the bird books were
because at that time that’s what I had my heart
set on, being an ornithologist,” Brunswick says.
One of the books that inspired Brunswick
was written by Gene Stratton-Porter. She was a
popular novelist in the early 1900s. Stratton-
Porter was best known for her fictional accounts
set in and around an Indiana swamp called the
Limberlost. She was also an amateur naturalist
and wrote several books about birds.
“I was in the eighth grade in that little two-room
schoolhouse reading ‘What I Have Done With
Birds’ by Gene Stratton-Porter, and the teacher
walked up to see what book I was reading, and
looked at it and the teacher said, ‘You know that
place isn’t very far from here.’ And I didn’t know
what she was talking about.”
The Limberlost actually was only a few miles
west across the state line. Stratton-Porter
moved to the area in 1888. But to the locals, the
trees were valuable lumber and the swamp was
a waste of land. Stratton-Porter wrote that
commerce attacked the Limberlost and began,
she said, its usual process of devastation. By
1910, two decades of destruction were
complete.
“This Loblolly Marsh was what I consider the
heart of the Limberlost area and this marsh was
actually the last thing that was drained in this
area so the farmers could start farming it,” says
Brunswick.
Brunswick became a farmer himself. He
started a dairy only a mile from the old Loblolly
Marsh. Through the years he learned more about
the swamp and the birds that lived there.
Later he formed the Limberlost
Remembered project. The group’s mission: to
bring Loblolly Marsh back to life. And they’ve
made a lot of headway.
Brunswick, who’s 63, is retried from farming.
He’s now an ecologist for the Indiana
Department of Natural Resources. He oversees
the Limberlost restoration.
We take a look at the changes aboard his ATV.
He’s maneuvering along a path near the edge of
the marsh. It’s thick with prairie cord grass,
switch grass and blue stem. Some of the grasses
have been planted here; other plant seeds have
lain dormant for decades and are now reclaiming
the ground on their own.
Out in the marsh the water is a gentle sea of
green and wildflowers abound around the edges.
But Brunswick’s love of the birds has not gone
away. And he’s thrilled to see them returning to
their marsh home.
“This is the area where we see American Bittern
once in a while. There’s been Virginia Rail, we
hear Sora Rail in here also. Sora is just a real
little bird that has just the dandiest sound when
it makes its call,” Brunswick says.
These birds and others like them are in
trouble. Most of the wetlands and prairies where
birds once thrived have disappeared.
Brunswick’s dream of becoming an
ornithologist never happened. But his work to
save the Limberlost has been his way of doing
something for the birds he loves.
“Actually when I think about this work I’m doing
it takes me back to that dream I had when I was
a kid in that two room schoolhouse. That dream
of being an ornithologist was taken away and
here, about 30 years later, seeing this land
flooding, I’m seeing birds that, some of them, I
never saw before.”
And the work of an old farmer has restored
the wetlands and natural areas that farmers
before him destroyed.
A Nashville Warbler - one of the birds that Matt Etterson heard during this bird count in Canada (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
The numbers and types of songbirds
are dropping dramatically in many areas of
the country. A lot of people are trying to
get a better count on the number of birds
that are still around. Stephanie Hemphill recently went with researchers
on one of the more ambitious bird count projects:
Transcript
The numbers and types of songbirds
are dropping dramatically in many areas of
the country. A lot of people are trying to
get a better count on the number of birds
that are still around. Stephanie Hemphill recently went with researchers
on one of the more ambitious bird count projects:
The jumping off point for this trip is a tiny airport with a grass runway in
northern Minnesota, about 20 miles from the Canadian border.
We fly for 15 minutes, over trees and swamps as far as the eye can see. Down
below we get a glimpse of a moose. And, later, a pair of rare trumpeter swans
in their nest.
The helicopter sets down in what’s known as a floating bog. Its runners are
sitting in six inches of water.
We jump out in knee-high boots and rain jackets, and douse with DEET to try
to keep the mosquitoes away.
I’m following Heidi Seeland, a graduate student who seems to know her way
around a bog.
We’re in knee-deep water. Then it’s thigh-deep Pretty soon it’s waist-deep. I try
to step on a clump of sphagnum moss. But it sinks. It holds onto my boot, and
I’m sitting in water.
Heidi helps me up, and we catch up with the others.
They fan out on different points of the compass. I follow Matt Etterson. He’s an
ornithologist, a bird expert. We slog through the bog for nearly half an hour.
Etterson is aiming for a piece of higher ground, where the trees are a little
taller, better for nesting.
Suddenly he stops. He’s found the spot he was looking for. He sets his watch
for 10 minutes and pulls out a notebook.
Etterson cocks his head this way and that, jotting the names of the birds he can
hear, and the time he hears them. He doesn’t pay any attention to the mosquito
biting the back of his neck. He just listens and takes notes.
“We had a couple of hermit thrush — that’s the singing to the north of us. A
veery called a couple of times to the west of us. A Nashville warbler, and a
couple of western palm warblers, and that was about it. It was pretty quiet
otherwise,” Etterson said.
We trudge through the muck for another 20 or 30 minutes and he repeats the
process.
It’s two hours later, and the three researchers meet at the helicopter landing spot
and compare notes. They’re excited about Etterson’s veery and Nashville
warbler. The others heard a Connecticut warbler and a Lincoln’s sparrow.
They would have been really happy if they’d heard a golden-winged warbler.
It’s one of the most threatened of bird species. The number of golden-winged
warblers has declined by some 80% during the last 50 years.
Today’s trip is an experiment to see how well it works to count birds in remote
places, using a helicopter.
It’ll take five years to finish the bird count here. Then, in 10 or 20 years, they’ll
do it all over again, to see how the birds are faring.
For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.
A single wind turbine can change air currents, creating dangerous winds for birds and other airborne wildlife. (Photo by Michael Tyas)
Monitoring radar and thermal imaging for signs of migrating birds or putting sensors on turbines are some ways to lessen a turbine's impact on birds.
(Photo by David Orsborne)
Wind energy is one of the fastest growing sources of new electricity in the United States. For some environmentalists, that’s
good news. Wind turbines don’t spew smoke into the air. There’s no nuclear by-product. But there is an environmental risk. To see it, you have to view the wind turbines through the eyes of a bird.
The GLRC’s Dustin Dwyer has more:
Transcript
Wind energy is one of the fastest growing sources of new electricity in the United States.
For some environmentalists, that’s good news. Wind turbines don’t spew smoke into the
air. There’s no nuclear byproduct. But there is an environmental risk. To see it, you
have to view the wind turbines through the eyes of a bird. The GLRC’s Dustin Dwyer
has more:
Chandler Robbins has spent a lot of time studying how birds kill themselves. He says he
would go out on windy nights to the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. He’d
stand at the bottom of the 555 foot tall obelisk and watch the birds at the top:
“Just as they get to the tower, they just go around the edge of it and bang, the turbulence
from the winds going around the tower, sweeps those birds against the tower, and they’re
killed.”
Speaking at a conference, Robbins tells the crowd he once watched more than 500 birds
slam into the monument in one night, and that monument is standing still. Now imagine
wind turbines, some of them about as tall as the Washington Monument, with spinning
blades that reach nearly a football field in diameter.
Alex Hoar is with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He says a single turbine can now
change air currents for three acres around the turbine itself:
“So, if you put up a hundred turbines, the blades are sweeping 300 acres. So, that’s a large
space. And what we don’t know is when are birds and bats at risk.”
We don’t know because no one has really studied it. Both Alex Hoar and Chandler
Robbins say scientists know a lot about where birds take off and where they land. They
know about migration patterns, but they don’t know about what birds do, or where they
go while they’re in the air.
So, with more wind farms being built across the country, it’s not clear what affect they
might have on bird populations, but some suspect it won’t be good. Peter Kailing works
with an environmental consulting company. He recently did an environmental impact
study for a new 47 hundred acre commercial wind farm in Michigan. He says scientists
can learn a lot from the wind farms that have already been built. He says the ones that
have done the most damage to wildlife have a few things in common:
“The turbine was in a narrow valley, or a mountain-pass, or on the edge of a large
water body with steep wooded cover that was used by migrating songbirds, there’s almost
always a topographical association.”
Weather also plays a role. Peter Kailing and others say that birds tend to avoid cloud
banks by flying under them. That could put them in the path of turbine blades. So, one
way to limit damage would be to shut the turbines down on cloudy days.
Chandler Robbins says better technology could also limit damage. He says turbine blades
could be equipped with sensors:
“If a bird or a bat collided with that blade, it would set up enough vibration so that the
blade could be feathered temporarily to avoid other birds striking until the immediate
problem is over.”
Feathering essentially means that you twist the angle of the blade so that wind passes
over it, rather than pushing the blade into a spin. That way, birds aren’t sucked into it.
It’s basically the turbine’s braking system. Some say you don’t even need a sensor on the
turbine. They say engineers could monitor radar and thermal imaging. That would tell
them if any migrating birds are in the area, and if they are, feather the blades.
Of course, the absolute safest solution in the short term might be just to stop building
wind farms, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks that’s a good idea.
Most seem to realize that any way of making electricity will have some impact on the
environment. The question is what can be done with each of them to minimize the risk.
With wind energy, that work is just getting started.
Superfast muscles help this bird sing. (Photo by Brian Peterson)
Scientists have come one step closer to understanding how birds create their songs. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams explains:
Transcript
Scientists have come one step closer to understanding how birds
create their songs. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca
Williams explains:
(dove song)
That’s a cooing ring dove. And this is a recording of special muscles
the dove’s using to control its song: (sound of muscle activity).
Those muscles are called aerobic superfast muscles. It’s a type of
muscle that has been found in rattlesnakes and some fish. The
muscles were just discovered in birds for the first time.
The research was published in the journal Nature. Coen
Elemans is the lead researcher. He says a unique quality of the dove’s
song led him to investigate it further.
“And we found that some of these doves have a trill in their song, they
make a sound something like (mimics dove song). And during this
short trill, you get elements that are so short, sometimes ten or nine
milliseconds, that I was wondering, how can this be done? This is so
fast that normal locomotory muscles you find in vertebrates cannot do the job.”
Elemans says this discovery could be just the beginning. He says
songbirds have more complex vocal systems than doves… so
songbirds could be using even faster muscles.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Rebecca Williams.
Each year, many of us look forward to the return of familiar birds at
the feeder. But a new study has found warmer temperatures are causing
birds like chickadees and larks to find new homes. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports:
Many coffee growers in Latin America are now replanting the shade trees. (Source: MarkSweep at Wikimedia Commons)
