Red Rock Audubon Society Information Center – Nat’l Audubon & Cornell Labs

Get Ready for the Christmas Bird Count

November 15, 2010 By RRAS Info

Audubon’s 111th annual Christmas Bird Count (CBC) will take place between Tuesday, December 14, 2010 and Wednesday, January 5, 2011. The longest-running wildlife census in the world, the count engages citizen scientists from Barrow, Alaska to Belize and beyond. Since 2000, Bird Studies Canada (BSC) has partnered with Audubon to coordinate counts in Canada.

From feeder-watchers and field observers to count compilers and regional editors, everyone who takes part in the Christmas Bird Count does it for love of birds and the excitement of friendly competition—and with the knowledge that their efforts are making a difference for science and bird conservation.

Filed Under: Nat'l Audubon & Cornell Labs Tagged With: CBC

U.S. Senate Must Act This Year to Pass Oil Spill Recovery Legislation

November 14, 2010 By RRAS Info

With Congress returning to Washington in less than a week, Audubon’s policy and grassroots teams are devoting their efforts to urging the Senate to pass oil spill recovery legislation before the end of the calendar year. In July the House of Representatives passed a measure sponsored by Representatives Charlie Melancon (D-LA) and Steve Scalise (R-LA) to direct money to Gulf Coast Restoration; it’s up to the Senate to follow their lead. The Deepwater Horizon disaster inflicted the most damage on coastal Louisiana, an area already ravaged by federal and state mismanagement and an important focal point of Audubon policy efforts over the past several years. Under the Clean Water Act, BP is liable for billions in civil penalties, but without Congressional action that money is destined for the coffers of the Federal Treasury. It is unacceptable for the federal government to receive a windfall from the most severe environmental disaster in our nation’s history, especially when Louisiana and the rest of the Gulf region still require so much assistance to recover from it.

On the policy side, representatives of Audubon are in constant communication with key Capitol Hill staffers, Obama administration officials, and Gulf state governors’ offices to negotiate and garner support for legislation that would direct Clean Water Act penalties to environmental recovery and restoration efforts in the Gulf States. The grassroots team is busy encouraging Audubon members and volunteers to communicate with their representatives in Congress as well as local and state governments to show their support for such legislation — look for an action alert next week. Finally, Audubon is calling members in key states, asking them to contact their Senators in Washington DC to express their support for swift Congressional action on this vitally important issue. Please respond if you get a call next week!

Filed Under: Nat'l Audubon & Cornell Labs

The 111th Christmas Bird Count: 12/14/10 – 01/05/11

October 5, 2010 By RRAS Info

The 111th Christmas Bird Count: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 to Wednesday, January 5, 2011

From December 14 through January 5 tens of thousands of volunteers throughout the Americas take part in an adventure that has become a family tradition among generations. Families and students, birders and scientists, armed with binoculars, bird guides and checklists go out on an annual mission – often before dawn. For over one hundred years, the desire to both make a difference and to experience the beauty of nature has driven dedicated people to leave the comfort of a warm house during the Holiday season.

Each of the citizen scientists who annually braves snow, wind, or rain, to take part in the Christmas Bird Count makes an enormous contribution to conservation. Audubon and other organizations use data collected in this longest-running wildlife census to assess the health of bird populations – and to help guide conservation action. This year’s count will help scientists understand the impact of the Gulf oil spill on vulnerable species.

From feeder-watchers and field observers to count compilers and regional editors, everyone who takes part in the Christmas Bird Count does it for love of birds and the excitement of friendly competition — and with the knowledge that their efforts are making a difference for science and bird conservation.

Read the FAQ about the Christmas Bird Count at National Audubon.

Filed Under: Nat'l Audubon & Cornell Labs, Volunteer Opportunities Tagged With: CBC

Protect Pristine Habitat in Alaska

September 21, 2010 By RRAS Info

The largest public tract of land in the United States sits on Alaska’s North Slope. Known as the “National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska,” the maze of lakes, ponds, rivers, and streams is a globally recognized ecological resource that supports caribou, millions of breeding and migrating birds, beluga whales, polar bears, wolves, wolverines, and other wildlife.

American Golden Plover | Credit: Milo Burcham

We have an opportunity to protect millions of acres of pristine habitat in Alaska. Please submit your public comments today.

Credit: Milo Burcham

In 1976, Congress charged the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) with managing these lands to provide “maximum protection” for special areas with important biological values. Although three million acres of the Reserve are now leased for oil and gas development, not a single acre has received permanent protection. But, the BLM is now seeking YOUR comments on a new plan for managing the lands within the Reserve, which could be our last best chance to preserve this pristine habitat for the future.

Please submit your citizen comments today, and urge the BLM to protect outstanding wildlife, wilderness, subsistence, and recreation values from oil and gas development.

The BLM-designated Special Areas include Teshekpuk Lake (vital waterbird nesting, molting, and staging habitat; calving area for the Teshekpuk Lake Caribou Herd); Kasegaluk Lagoon (a unique barrier island ecosystem where thousands of beluga whales and spotted seals gather; polar bears and grizzly bears feed on marine mammal carcasses here); the Colville River (one of the most important raptor nesting areas in the world); and the Utukok River Uplands (the heart of the calving area for the 400,000-animal Western Arctic Caribou Herd, an important resource for approximately forty villages in Western Alaska as well as the area’s wolves, bears, and wolverines).

The new Reserve-wide planning process provides a unique opportunity to ensure that future oil and gas development in the Reserve is properly balanced with protection of the exceptional biological values that support the area’s abundant Arctic wildlife, vital subsistence resources for Alaska Native villages, outstanding wilderness values, and extraordinary recreation opportunities.

Although the BLM has leased a significant amount of land for oil and gas, many of the highest-value habitat areas in the Reserve remain undisturbed. Now you have the opportunity to help protect these important areas!

Filed Under: Facebook Feed, Nat'l Audubon & Cornell Labs

Birds flock online

August 14, 2010 By RRAS Info

Supercomputer time will help ornithologists make ecological sense of millions of records of bird sightings.

By: Emma Marris at Nature News

Midway through a birding expedition last May off the Louisiana coast, Donna Dittmann lost her footing and broke her leg. Unaware of this, she kept the weight off her swollen ankle while surveying birds the next day at an unnamed islet that was packed with nesting pelicans, egrets and terns. After she returned home, a visit to the emergency room revealed the extent of her injury. Her husband, Steven Cardiff, who, like Dittman, is a collections manager at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science in Baton Rouge, dubbed the islet ‘Fractured Fibula Island’ in her honour. He then he went online and added the species they had seen there to ‘eBird‘.

A database that records the vast numbers of sightings routinely made by dedicated birders around the globe, eBird has been growing steadily since it’s launch in 2002. More than 48 million observations have been entered so far — 10 million of them in 2010 alone. The data represent millions of hours of eye-straining — and sometimes leg-breaking — observations.

According to Steve Kelling, director of information science at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in New York, who runs the project together with the New York-based National Audubon Society, “the challenge now is to try to do something meaningful with all these data”.

Fortunately, eBird has just been given some powerful help. Last week Kelling learned that the project has been awarded 100,000 hours on the US National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid supercomputer. By performing intensive data analysis using the supercomputer, Kelling and his colleagues hope to turn the scattered observations of each bird species into a global view of its movements.

The eBird team will start by combining the bird sightings with remote sensing information from sources such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. Among the data that can be gleaned from MODIS is precisely when different places on Earth are ‘greening up’ in the spring — a seasonal phenomenon that can be strongly correlated with bird movement.

The computers will then ‘learn’ what kind of land cover, what timing pattern of greening and what human densities best predict bird presence, and generate a million more simulated observations for each species: points where it is predicted to be either present or absent at different times throughout the year. The result is an animated map of bird movements. An early model of the movements of the indigo bunting (Passerina cyanea), a songbird that winters in the tropics, took five days to run on the lab’s own computers. But the visualization was compelling, showing how the birds first made landfall at or near the Mississippi Delta and then used the river system to find their way to northern forests (see animation). “This shows how important the Gulf coast is early on in the migration,” says Kelling.

With TeraGrid, the Cornell lab plans to marry such models to scenarios for climate change from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in hopes of predicting migratory changes — and perhaps extinctions — for hundreds of species. The lab could theoretically do the same work on many smaller computers, perhaps relying on a ‘cloud’ of laptops belonging to their birding volunteers, according to David Anderson, director of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) at the University of California, Berkeley. Kelling says they may — some day. “We don’t have the infrastructure or the expertise now to figure out the issues of parsing all the data out,” he says.

These ecological problems are a new frontier for supercomputing, says John Cobb, a principal investigator for TeraGrid at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and a co-investigator for DataONE, a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation to gather and harmonize ecological and environmental data sets. With vast amounts of computing power comes the opportunity to turn the work of many amateur birders into a nuanced portrait of how species migrate. “It is a wonderful story about how they have used all those people who are enthusiastic about birdwatching and made a scientifically significant data set,” says Cobb.

Nature.com

http://www.nature.com/

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100810/full/news.2010.395.html

eBird is an Audubon and Cornell Lab of Ornithology project

Filed Under: Nat'l Audubon & Cornell Labs Tagged With: eBird

A Message from Frank Gill

July 4, 2010 By RRAS Info

As these words are written, deadly crude continues to spew from a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Amid the horror of the Gulf disaster, images of birds again serve as the most visible indicators of damage to our environment and of hope for the future.

Once again, a crisis for people, for wildlife and for birds demands all the commitment and expertise we can muster. And again, the Audubon network is delivering. =

As the crisis mounted, Audubon chapters across the Gulf coast took action. In Louisiana, Baton Rouge Audubon helped develop a protocol for reporting on oiled birds, while also assessing protection needs at nearby sanctuaries. They, along with Orleans Audubon, began reporting on birds’ status as the oil moved in.

Meanwhile, in Alabama the Mobile Bay Audubon Society deployed teams of trained volunteers to monitor impacts on birds and beaches along that state’s coastline. Chapters of the Suncoast Shorebird Partnership, along with the Francis M. Weston Audubon Society, Collier County Audubon and the Coastal Island Sanctuaries, all came together to provide information on vital bird habitats to aid Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission in establishing protection priorities.

They were not alone. State and National Audubon staff immediately launched efforts to help coordinate on-the-scene volunteer support for emergency response crews across the region. Though the disaster was unfolding in slow motion, they anticipated the need for far more volunteer help. Now, a fully-functioning Audubon Volunteer Response Center is operating in Moss Point, Mississippi. More than 30,000 people nationwide have registered to lend a hand. And there is plenty to be done.

Opposing images from the Gulf help to tell the story. We are all too familiar with sickening pictures of oiled and dying birds, among them Brown Pelicans, only recently removed from the Endangered Species List. Yet when I traveled to the Gulf just weeks ago, I saw scores of thriving pelicans nesting on an island in Mobile Bay awaiting the arrival of their next generation.

We can’t yet know how many of that new generation hatched in the Gulf will survive and how many will die. As southbound migrating sandpipers arrive in early summer, it is likely that many will never continue their journeys. What will become of the Reddish Egrets, Least Terns, Mottled Ducks or Seaside Sparrows that have been trying to nest along the shores? Without a doubt, the future health of countless birds and habitats depends, in part, on us. We will fight to restore the health of Important Bird Areas fouled by the spill. But our efforts must extend further.

Audubon’s unique network can show Americans how birds connect us all to the Gulf, and how we can help them. Conservation and citizen science efforts will provide new insights into the spill’s impacts on populations in the Gulf and beyond. Habitat and IBA protection will take on greater significance nationwide.

Though not everyone can take direct action to save a pelican or an oiled habitat, we can all protect vital flyways and healthy populations to benefit species impacted by the disaster—from Common Loons in the Great Lakes to Ospreys in a mountain lake in Montana. Together, we can empower volunteers flocking to respond to the spill to make vital contributions that will make a difference, while still working closer to home.

Our collective responses must include redoubling our efforts to secure saner policies to protect fragile resources from risky energy extraction wherever it might occur. The Arctic Sea was given only a short-term reprieve from misguided deepwater drilling in the wake of the disaster—we must make it permanent. We need stricter regulation of deepwater drilling to make sure that accidents like the Gulf spill never happen again. And we can use the grim realities of the spill to further strengthen our push for a cleaner, safer and renewable energy future.

The Gulf disaster is truly America’s crisis and it demands our unified response. It is hard to say how long it will take to restore the well-being of the birds, other wildlife and communities that depend on the Gulf. But Audubon is in it for the long haul to ensure not just emergency relief, but long-term restoration of the environment and of hope. Along the way, our combined conservation efforts can benefit birds, habitats and communities across America.

As the devastating oil spill spread toward vulnerable wildlife and habitats, Audubon was there. Now we need your help. There’s no need to take out your wallet. Go to the website below and vote for Audubon once a week until August 22. Tell your friends too. With enough votes, Members Project® from American Express and TakePart will help fund Audubon’s work to restore a devastated ecosystem. We’ve worked for birds, wildlife and communities in the Gulf for decades—help us continue long after the headlines fade. Vote now at www.takepart.com/membersproject/vote.

Filed Under: Nat'l Audubon & Cornell Labs Tagged With: Gulf of Mexico

Funky Nests in Funky Places Contest!

May 23, 2010 By RRAS Info

Ithaca, NY—The Celebrate Urban Birds project at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is bringing back its “Funky Nests in Funky Places” environmental challenge! Participants sent in more than 600 entries last year. They found nests in hanging flower baskets, an old boot, a teacup, a coffee can–even on top of a clothespin, where a hummingbird built its tiny nest. Celebrate Urban Birds is a free, year-round citizen-science project from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, focused on birds in neighborhood settings.

For the 2010 Funky Nests in Funky Places challenge, participants may take photos, do a painting, write a story, or shoot a video showing a bird’s nest built in some out-of-the-way or out-of-this-world place.

“We’ve had such fun with this challenge,” says project leader Karen Purcell. “The theme really struck a chord with people. You wouldn’t believe how many people showed us bird nests in barbecue grills, bathrooms, garden tools, and signs. We even had Tree Swallows nesting in a cannon!”

Prizes include Kaytee bird feeders and seed, sound CDs, books, Cornell Lab gift baskets, nest boxes, and more. The first 50 entrants will receive a copy of the “Doves and Pigeons” poster by Julie Zickefoose and selected images and videos will be posted on the Celebrate Urban Birds website. We’ll also be creating a 2011 calendar using some of the best entries.

Send us your entry before July 1, 2010.

Visit the Celebrate Urban Birds website for more information.

The 2010 Funky Nests in Funky Places challenge is sponsored in part by Kaytee.

Filed Under: Nat'l Audubon & Cornell Labs

Volunteers Needed to Monitor Nesting Birds

May 23, 2010 By RRAS Info

Ithaca, NY–Peeking is allowed. In fact, it is a vital part of participation in the NestWatch citizen-science project offered by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. NestWatchers peek into bird nests and nest boxes to collect data on which species are nesting, when eggs are laid, how many eggs are in a nest, and how many chicks hatch and fledge. Scientists use NestWatch information to learn more about nesting birds and study the impacts of climate change and land use.

“NestWatch is a free, fun activity for people of any age,” says project leader Laura Burkholder. “The nesting season is now in full swing, and it’s not too late to get in on the action. NestWatchers participate on their own, in classrooms, or as a homeschool project. We need more people to help gather this important information.”

All materials and instructions are on the NestWatch website, including directions on how to get certified to monitor nests without disturbing the birds, following the NestWatch Code of Conduct. Look for information on how to provide the best and safest boxes for bluebirds, swallows, chickadees, and other cavity-nesting birds and how to monitor the nests of backyard birds that don’t use nest boxes, such as phoebes, robins, and goldfinches.

Download and post this NestWatch flyer. (PDF)

NestWatch was developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in collaboration with the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, and funded by the National Science Foundation.

Filed Under: Nat'l Audubon & Cornell Labs

Stop New Oil Drilling in Fragile Arctic Ocean

May 23, 2010 By RRAS Info

Submitted by: Audubon Action Center

Shell Oil says it will have drill bits in place for exploratory drilling in the Arctic Ocean in just a few weeks — even before we know what caused the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The Department of the Interior needs to officially withdraw approval of Shell’s summer drilling plans and conduct a complete reassessment in light of the ongoing BP blowout.

A long-term energy strategy should focus on clean, job-producing renewable technologies, not expanded drilling in our oceans. Please call on President Obama to put a hold on Shell Oil’s plans to drill in the Arctic Ocean until a thorough assessment is done on what a possible oil spill would mean for the fragile, icy Arctic ocean, and how a realistic clean up effort might take place should the unthinkable happen — just as it did in the Gulf of Mexico. Please send the sample letter or edit it with your own words to explain why protecting the Arctic Ocean is important to YOU.

Visit: https://secure3.convio.net/nasaud/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=854

http://www.audubonaction.org

Filed Under: Nat'l Audubon & Cornell Labs

Clean Air Act Under Attack

May 23, 2010 By RRAS Info

Submitted by: Audubon Action Center

The Senate is set to consider a proposal by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski that would roll back critical Clean Air Act protections and block measures to reduce harmful global warming pollution. By letting big polluters off the hook, this amendment would put public health at risk and stop efforts to reduce America’s oil dependence, jump-start a vibrant clean energy economy, and protect our environment.
Send the sample letter or edit it with your own words to let your U.S. Senators know why protecting the Clean Air Act is important to you.