| Successor | USA National Phenology Network |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1881 |
| Founder | Wells Cooke |
| Dissolved | 1970 |
| Location |
|
Area served | North America |
| Products | Bird migration records |
| Affiliations | American Ornithologists' Union, United States Geological Survey |
Volunteers | 3000 (peak number) |
| Website | https://www.usgs.gov/centers/pwrc/science/north-american-bird-phenology-program |
The North American Bird Phenology Program houses a unique and largely forgotten collection of six million Migration Observer Cards that illuminate migration patterns and population status of the birds of North America. These handwritten cards contain almost all of what was known of bird distribution and natural history from the latter part of the 19th century through World War II. The bulk of the records are the result of the work of a network of observers who recorded migration arrival dates in the spring and fall in a program that, in its heyday, involved 3000 participants. Today, those records are being processed and placed into a modern database for analysis. This information will be used, along with recently collected arrival times of migrant birds, and in conjunction with historical weather data, to examine how bird migration is being affected by climate change. The information from this analysis will provide critical information on bird distribution, migration timing and migration pathways and how they are changing. There is no other program that has this depth of information that can help us understand the effect that global climate change has on bird populations across the continent.[1]
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Ducks and Windfarms - Satellite Telemetry Program
Transcription
RIght now there's no wind turbines in the water in North America and so the work that's been done in Western Europe shows that one of the major effects of wind farms is to displace birds from the location of the wind farm. What we've been doing the last three years is trying to identify what we like to call "hotspots" of bird use. Those are the places you wouldn't want to put the wind farms, and so the Satellite Telemetry Project is designed to look at specifically those movement patterns and movement corridors that the birds have. We had to decide which species to focus on and we studied, last year, Black Scoters. This year, we decided to focus on Common Eider because it's the most common of the sea ducks around here. One of the criteria was we had to have something big enough to house a satellite transmitter. They're relatively large, and so you need something relatively big to hold it. The main fieldwork for this project is to catch the birds to put the satellite transmitters in them, so to do that, we usually start about three o'clock in the morning, depends on where we're gonna go. We usually have a crew of four boats, and each boat has at least three people in it. Then we go out and we set up the mist nets, and these mist nets look like a really thin badminton net. And these nets are unique because they're floating and the birds can't seen the net when they fly into it. And you set all this stuff up in the dark. You put a bunch of decoys around the nets to attract the birds in, and you hope that you've picked the right spot. If you have, then there's alot of action pretty quick in the morning before the birds can actually see the nets particularly well. And then by eight thirty, nine o'clock in the morning, the birds have found where they wanna hang out for the day, and so the capture rates go down. And then we bring them back to land where they're banded and processed. They have big legs, and for a size seven, it will spin, but it's the best you can do on them. You don't want to go any bigger? No, it'll get stuck on the foot. In this case, for the eiders, we only put transmitters on the adult females. The females are the ones that have all the power. They pick the nest sight when they establish pair bonds in the winter months. The male that pair bonds with them is gonna follow that female back to her nest sight. So, keeping track of the females is a critical thing for Population Biologists. So we keep all the adult females. There's a surgeon that spends the rest of the day, a U.S.G.S. surgeon, that does all of our surgeries. These transmitters that weigh about thirty six grams are surgically implanted into the birds. Because these are species that dive, they dive to about thirty meters deep, we don't want to impact their flight abilities, or their diving capabilies, so the way to do that is to surgically implant them. And by the end of the day, the birds are released. They're back out on the water and, at least with the Common Eiders, there's been alot of success. They're still all hanging around. So imagine you having a transmitter and we understand where you are every two or three days. And we do that throughout the year. Every two or three days. So one of the things we get is information about all the hangouts that that Eider likes to be during winter in Rhode Island. And we can relate that directly to what's there. Is it rocky reef? Is it a sandy beach? What's the depth of the water? How does that vary by weather conditions? So you really learn alot about what we call habitat selection, so where birds like to hang out. And you can then extrapolate from that. If all of our twenty six birds all use this particular kind of habitat then we can say ok, that's the places that they like to hang, those are the places we should avoid in terms of wind farms.
History
The program began in 1881 by Wells W. Cooke, who wanted to broaden knowledge and understanding of bird migration. While teaching on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota, Cooke began noting the arrival dates of migratory birds. He later coordinated volunteers throughout the Mississippi Flyway to collect arrival and departure data.
His success sparked the interest of the newly formed American Ornithologists' Union (AOU), who convened a committee on the distribution and migration of birds and chose C. Hart Merriam to be its chief. The AOU expanded the volunteer network to include the entire United States, Canada, and a portion of the West Indies. The program outgrew the capabilities of the AOU and was then passed, in the late 1880s, to the Division of Economic Ornithology where it reached its greatest extent of 3000 volunteers.
The Division of Economic Ornithology would later become the Bureau of Biological Survey and eventually lead to the creation of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Although the program was actively maintained by the Federal Government, participation gradually declined and, in 1970, the program was closed. For many years since, these records have been kept safe by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).[1]
Wells W. Cooke
Wells W. Cooke, son of Reverend Elisha Woodbridge Cook and Martha Miranda (Smith) Cook, was born on January 25, 1858, in Haydenville, Massachusetts. The 5th of nine children and eldest boy, Cooke developed an interest in natural history at the age of 12, when he received his first gun. He was known to collect bird specimens from his neighborhood and surrounding area. Cooke went on to receive an A.B. and A.M. degree from Ripon College. After his marriage to Carrie Amy Raymond in 1879, Cooke became a teacher in Indian schools and secondary schools in Minnesota. It was here, in Minnesota, that Cooke first began documenting arrival dates and began what is now the BPP.
Notably, Wells Cooke, became a member of the newly formed American Ornithologists' Union in 1884, elected in part due to papers he published while teaching in the Mississippi Valley. In 1885, Cooke became a Professor, and over a 16-year period was associated with three colleges: the University of Vermont, the Agricultural College of Colorado, and the state College of Pennsylvania. Cooke also began an appointment with the Biological Survey in the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1901 which lasted for 15 years, in which he published many publications on bird migration and distribution. Wells W. Cooke contributed in countless ways to the field of ornithology. He was the most eminent biologist on bird migration and distribution of his time.[2]
Chandler Robbins
Chandler "Chan" Robbins was one of the last coordinators of the BPP before it stopped accepting migration records in 1970. He is a lifelong birder and casts a long shadow in the birding world. In an interview conducted by Sam Droege, Chan talks about the history of the BPP, how it began, who ran the program and why it came to a close.
Migration Cards
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card submitted by Aldo Leopold -
passenger pigeon migration card
BPP Office
The Bird Phenology Program office is located at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland.
References
- ^ a b "About BPP". Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. U.S. Geological Survey. 13 November 2008. Archived from the original on 26 December 2016. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
- ^ "Bibliography". Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. U.S. Geological Survey. 13 November 2008. Archived from the original on 26 December 2016. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
This page was last edited on 4 November 2019, at 17:51