Ned and Gigi Batchelder have a passion for hummingbirds. They have been banding birds since 2001, and have assisted in banding 80 to 100 species of birds in Alabama, the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes area.

Since living in Montana, they have banded over 13,000 hummingbirds, at 150 different Montana locations. The Calliope species is the most prevalent in Montana. Their objective is to investigate breeding, migration patterns and longevity.

This is the second year they have banded hummers in Nevada. They have a special federal permit with USGS and also a Nevada permit to be licensed hummingbird banders. They were able to observe and band the Anna’s and Costa’s while in the Las Vegas area.

The female hummer builds the nest, lays the eggs, and feeds and cares for the young birds with no help from the male, whose sole duty is to breed and fertilize the eggs. The male mates with as many females as possible, but the female appears to choose the mate. Hummer nests are sometimes reworked and used year after year. If you are lucky, you can spot one of these tiny nests, about the size of a walnut, where the female lays two white eggs the size of a dried white bean. It takes 12-15 days for the eggs to hatch and nestlings stay in the nest for 18-23 days.

Ned and Gigi visited the Las Vegas area to band and study the hummingbirds which favor this area year around. Breeding was confirmed with both Anna’s and Costa’s species. They visited the Henderson Bird Preserve and the backyards of the many Audubon families in early November and will back in 2010 to continue banding.

Submitted by: John Hiatt, Conservation Chair

The Deserts of southeastern California and those lands on the east side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, including most of Nevada, are the driest areas in the United States.  Hence, the effects of changing climate are of particular interest.  In order to understand what the future may have in store for our deserts it is necessary to understand some basic definitions and concepts.

Climate is often defined as weather averaged over time.  While this is generally true, it misses the very important point that plant and animal communities are more heavily influenced by the extremes of weather than averages.  The average annual daily high temperatures in Honolulu and Las Vegas only differ by a degree or two yet nobody who is familiar with these two places in January or July would mistake one for the other.

The term “global warming” is generally used to describe the changes causing melting of the arctic ice pack and glaciers worldwide, but for those of us at mid-latitudes and low elevation the term “global climate change” is more appropriate.  If we think of climate change as an expression of a more energetic weather regime with greater extremes of rainfall, drought, and temperature we can begin to comprehend what the future may have in store for us.  For plant communities the concept of “effective precipitation” as opposed to “total precipitation” is the key to understanding the relation between precipitation and plant life.  Large areas of the Great Basin receive 8-10 inches of annual precipitation and so does the arctic slope in Alaska.  The difference between the plant communities in these two places, the Great Basin Desert and Arctic muskeg lies in the evapotranspiration rates, or ET.  The ET is the amount of water lost to the atmosphere be direct evaporation and transpired by the leaves of plants. In the Great Basin ET greatly exceeds precipitation while in the arctic rainfall exceeds ET. [Read more...]