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Season Four Begins!Spring is finally here! I don’t know about you but ever since the end of August last year I
have been counting down the days until the 2011 atlasing season. Last year we reached
the impressive milestone of visiting all 791 blocks and we bumped the list of potential
breeders up to 191 species! Now it seems that every day a new bird species arrives from
the south, beckoning us to once again take up our binoculars and go atlasing. By mid-May
more than 130 species will be displaying breeding behavior, so now is the time to begin
collecting data for Iowa’s 2nd Breeding Bird Atlas (BBA).
Statewide, volunteers have logged more than 5,300 hours of observation to date. To
focus our efforts for 2011, the progress completion map on the website has been revised.
Red pins now represent blocks with less than 5 hours of effort, yellow pins represent
blocks with between 5 and 10 hours of effort, and blue and green pins remain the same.
This year our primary objective is targeting those red pins (381 blocks with less than 5
hours of recorded effort). After all, these data are crucial for the conservation and man-
agement of Iowa’s wonderful birdlife.
I also invite you to mark your calendars for this season’s four big Blockbusting Weekends
(see page 8). We have pushed the dates back a little this year to hopefully capture more
attending young and fledgling
confirmations. For more in-
formation on the blockbusting
weekends and atlasing, or to
view up-to-date progress, either
contact me or check out the
BBA website. I can’t wait to see
what we accomplish this year.
Happy Birding!
- Billy Reiter-Marolf
Photo by Billy Reiter-Marolf
Eastern Phoebe (PO-H)
The Iowa NesTerVolume 1, Issue 6, sprIng/summer 2011
Iowa BreedIng BIrd atlas II
In This Issue:
Blockbusting 2010 in Louisa County
2New Bird Guides Break Boundaries
4Nesting Trends, Part 2
6 Blockbusting 2011
8
BBA CommitteeSteve DinSmore - Chair
ChriS CaSter
BruCe ehreSman
Jay Gilliam
DouG harr
ann JohnSon
Karen KinKeaD
Karen viSte-SparKman
BBA CoordinatorBilly reiter-marolf
1436 255th StreetBoone, Iowa 50036
Phone: (515)432-2823Cell: (515)298-3027
Website:http://bba.iowabirds.org
Volume 1, Issue 6 page 2FROM THE FIELD:
Blockbusting 2010 in Louisa CountyBy Karen Disbrow
he Iowa City Bird Club has been working the blocks in John-son County since the first year
of the Breeding Bird Atlas project. Last spring there was a planned blockbusting weekend in Louisa, Muscatine & Des Moines counties. What a great opportunity for ex-ploring new territory not too far from home. So we put the event on our schedule.
Friday evening Billy held an orga-nizing and training meeting for the area. The key is recording the bird species and their behavior. The first time I went out to do a block, I had only kept notes, I did not use a BBA recording form. That form makes a huge difference. It delin-eates the different levels of breed-ing possibilities; such as 7 or more singing males in a block is a prob-able for breeding. I know it sounds logical to know this, but I would not have known to keep track of singing males in a block without this reporting card. So I picked up plenty of cards and we each picked blocks to work on.
I had picked up a folding map of Des Moines County to use. These maps are larger print and easier to use in the car than the Sportsman Atlas for me. Other people were
Eurasian-collared Dove (PO-H)The Eurasian-collared Dove has been rapidly expanding its range across North America. Check out the BBA website (http://iowabirds.org) to learn where it has been recorded in Iowa.
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working Des Moines County so I handed my maps out. On Saturday morning as we were driving our first block we found a free map of Louisa County on one side and Muscatine County on the other. A great find for us that day and well worth research-ing and getting a map of this type to use in the field for other counties.
The first morning only two of us were able to go out. One of the neatest things that we observed was courting behavior. We observed a pair of Rock Pigeons on the edge of a barn roof “necking”, moving their heads to the side of the other bird;
like Frenchmen do when kissing each cheek. I do not remember seeing this behavior before, but it was obvious that it was a mating ritual.
As we were driving the block a local landowner stopped to chat. On finding out that we were doc-umenting the birds nesting in the area, he offered observations of his property and invited us to check it out. We unfortunately ran out of time and need to go back next year to check this area out more thoroughly.
Photo by Billy Reiter-Marolf
Volume 1, Issue 6 page 3
Photo byBilly Reiter-Marolf
The next day three of us went out to check out some additional blocks. It was the middle of May and I did not expect the Wood Duck babies to be so large. They were half the size of the adults. I expected that the duck species would have young that were small based on the mallards I had observed around the Iowa Riv-er. Blockbusting was full of new ex-periences and surprising revelations about birds that I thought I knew, but I really did not know at all.
The highlight of that day was see-ing two male Great Egrets display-ing for a female. The female was sitting on a limb about 20 feet up a tree. The males were below on the edge of a deep ditch displaying. Sights like these make a real impres-sion. I have been birding for twenty years and rarely have I seen mat-ing displays. By going out during the breeding season and spending sig-nificant time searching an area the odds of seeing a marvelous display are greatly increased. The camara-derie of birding all day in a new area is an added bonus to this activity.
This is just a snapshot of a great weekend spent birding. I have lis-tened to stories of birding from other IOU members over the years. Blockbusting is one of those oppor-tunities for building great birding memories.
Wood Duck (CO-FL)
Photo by Billy Reiter-Marolf
Great Egret (OB-O)
Photo by Billy Reiter-Marolf
ike most birders, I’d almost hate to admit how many avian ID field guides are on my bookshelves. They
date from my first one (Little Golden Guide to the Birds, received in 1957) to a couple of the very newest reviewed below. My first important field guide was, of course, Roger Tory Peterson’s classic work. Later, when teaching lab and field ornithology at South Dakota State University in 1970, I switched my stu-dents from Peterson’s guide to the just-published Birds of North America by Robbins, Bruun, Zim & Singer, because it covered all of the continent (important in SD, where many western species may occur) and be-cause it depicted at least a slight glimpse of the habitat of some species.
Right now I have around 20 North American field guides (general and specialty), plus 7 or 8 for Central and South America and Europe. Field guides just keep getting better, so many birders latch onto every new one that comes along. In the past couple of years, at least four new field guides for North American birds have hit the market, plus a revised and updated Peter-son guide. A good excuse for getting each new field guide upon publication is that bird names and relation-ships are continually changing, so having the latest refer-ence keeps birders abreast of the latest lumps or splits, name changes, etc. My personal favorite remains Na-tional Geographic’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America, especially since it was recently split into east-ern and western editions, with much more detail and ID tips (it now uses the Peterson arrow system to point out critical field marks) included for each species. David Allen Sibley’s guide is also top-notch. But here are a couple of exceptionally impressive new entries to this ever-expanding library.
The STOKES FIELD GUIDE to the BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA, by Donald and Lillian Stokes (Little, Brown & Company, 2010). I’ve never been much of a fan of photographic field guides, with the exception of Kenn Kaufman’s innovative version a few years ago, that one using computer-enhanced photos to give users a bet-ter look at field marks and colors than previous photo guides. However, I’ll make another exception for the new Stokes guide, which now combines their previous eastern and western editions into a single volume. It’s packed with outstanding photos of every species, in-cluding male, female and immature plumages. There is also a uniformity of good lighting on almost every photo, indicating these also may have been computer-brightened. Besides offering quite extensive text de-
Book Reviews:
New Bird Guides Break BoundariesBy Doug Harr
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Volume 1, Issue 6 page 4
scriptions, updated maps and the latest AOU name changes or lumps and splits, it even comes with a CD featuring songs and calls of more than 600 species. This nearly 800-page guide won’t be one to carry around in the field, however, unless you have a big pocket in your birding vest and don’t mind listing to one side while you walk—it’s slightly larger than the NatGeo guide and twice as thick. I’d call it a “car seat” reference, but for $25 it’s well worth the price. It is available at almost all bookstores for around $25, and somewhat less online.
THE CROSSLEY ID GUIDE: Eastern Birds, by Richard Crossley (Princeton University Press, 2011). Crossley’s vision was to take birding into the 21st-century by cre-ating a guide that shows birds the way they are seen in real life. Instead of offering the usual single “flat” bird picture, he has created multi-dimensional scenes with every detail in focus to show a wide range of views of birds in behavioral action, in their proper habitats, and at varying distances from the observer. New photog-
Volume 1, Issue 6 page 5
Photo by
raphy and computer developments were instrumen-tal in allowing the author to produce 640 composite scenes of real life birds in many different situations cre-ated from over 10,000 of his own photographs. Mul-tiple photos of each species have been electronically “clipped” and pasted onto a photographic background depicting habitat typical for the grouping on each page (this takes “Photoshopping” to a new level). Birds are depicted at various distances from the viewer (reader), so that this artificial depth-of-field helps show how a species’ appearance might change with distance.
My only complaint about just a few of the photos is in regard to nocturnal species or those pictured in deep forest shade. Nightjars, for example, are correctly de-picted at night, but the photos seem a bit overly dark, thus somewhat obscuring field marks. Now, this might be considered a “realistic” viewing scenario, but I’ve found with today’s incredible optics, even in very low light I can often see more color and detail than are illustrated in the guide’s darker photo settings. Never-theless, this is a photographic guide so innovative as to surely gain huge accolades, even from folks like me who prefer artists’ renditions of birds in their field guides.
Perhaps one of the best features is the inclusion of 4-letter AOU codes for each species (e.g., AMRO = American Robin). Birders increasingly are using these codes as shorthand for their lists and reports, and hav-ing a ready reference in your field guide is a stroke of sheer genius. Not only does it make sense for people who Twitter their sighting to other birders, but birders can now amaze (or bore) their non-birding friends by saying things like, “I just heard a WEME singing in the meadow!” Another different feature is that species are not necessarily placed in phylogenetic order, as is the norm for many field guides. Rather, the book divides birds into eight groups, such as “swimming waterbirds”, “walking waterbirds”, or “aerial landbirds”. That might not prove popular with... (continued on page 7)
Observed Possible Probable Confirmed Observed Possible Probable Confirmed
e have passed the halfway point of Iowa’s Second Breeding Bird Atlas (BBA). Volunteers began collecting data in 2008 and will continue atlasing through 2012. For some species, these data are already showing
some interesting trends. Some species are being recorded more than they were during the first BBA and some species are being recorded less. For species with more records now, this almost certainly indicates an expansion of breeding range. For species with fewer records now, one can only wonder if these data are truly showing a retraction in breeding range or just a deficiency in record collecting up to this point. Remember, we are comparing three-years of data from the current atlas to six-years of data from the first atlas (1985-1990). This multi-part feature will illustrate species with the most intriguing breeding range shifts to date.
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Loggerhead Shrike: A species found in open prairies and pastures with scattered trees, bushes and hedge-rows. The Loggerhead Shrike has drastically declined over the last 50 years primarily due to habitat loss, as well as exposure to pesticides, predation, and vehicle collisions. In the current BBA there are only 9 nesting confir-mations, compared to the 59 confirmations recorded during the first BBA.
Ruffed Grouse: During the first BBA there were 17 nesting confirmations. Now, during the second BBA, there are only 2 confirmed Ruffed Grouse records in northeastern Iowa (and only 7 records total). Although Ruffed Grouse populations are known to have cyclical highs and lows, these apparent declines are likely due to the loss and degradation of their preferred habitat: early successional forests and shrub lands
BBA 1 (1985-1990) BBA 1I (2008-Present)
Volume 1, Issue 6 page 6
Nesting Trends of Iowa’s Breeding BirdsPart 11: Declining Trends?
BBA 1 (1985-1990) BBA 1I (2008-Present)
BBA 1 (1985-1990) BBA 1I (2008-Present)
Observed Possible Probable Confirmed Observed Possible Probable Confirmed
Northern Bobwhite: Declining 4-5% a year since the mid-1960’s due to changes in agricultural practices, the Northern Bobwhite has only been confirmed in 4 blocks during the current BBA. Simplified crop rotations (corn/bean rotation with little small grains and hay) and larger, weedless crop fields simply do not provide the habitats that Bobwhite need. During the first atlas their population increased due to new CRP fields, but since then CRP has not been managed in many areas to maintain these benefits. Iowa is at the northern fringe of Bobwhite range and since 2007 a series of snowy winters have also greatly contributed to their decline.
To follow the progress of these and 188 other species visit the Progress/History tab on the BBA II website at: http://bba.iowabirds.org
...birders seasoned upon more standard groupings. To be sure, there are a couple of other drawbacks. One is that this guide only covers the eastern 2/3 of North America (only to the Rocky Mountain front). Another is that this volume is even slightly larger than Sibley’s original edition, definitely making this another “car seat” reference book. To me, it’s also a bit short on text description, although additional text is available on the author’s website, listed in the book’s introduction. Still, that’s not handy in the field unless you happen to have a smartphone along with you. I would consider Crossley’s guide to be a good possibility for beginning or intermediate birders, because it so nicely relates species to their usual habitats. But it is also a great book for birders at any level of expertise, if nothing else because it is a gorgeous book that makes anyone want to sit down and page through it. Bookstore-priced at about $35, you can likely find it online for less.
Volume 1, Issue 6 page 7
New Bird Guides Break Boundaries (continued from page 5)
Sample page from the Crossely ID Guide, Least Bittern
he Iowa Ornithologists’ Union and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources will be hosting four Breed-ing Bird Atlas (BBA) Blockbusting Weekends around the state next summer (2011). Each weekend will begin with a presentation about the BBA on Friday evening. Volunteers will learn how to participate, how to de-
termine breeding bird status, and how to turn in observations. During Saturday and Sunday, volunteers will be out in blocks (predetermined areas to inventory) searching for nesting birds. Atlas volunteers are encouraged to visit any blocks within a reasonable driving distance, and there will be a sign up sheet to divide up the targeted blocks. Volunteers are responsible for making arrangements for their own accommodations and meals. If you plan on participating, please RSVP to the BBA Coordinator the Monday prior to the weekend of each event. For more specific information, please visit http://bba.iowabirds.org or contact the BBA volunteer coordinator at [email protected] or 515-298-3027.
Volume 1, Issue 6 page 8
Blockbusting 2011
Federal and State law prohibits employment and/or public accommodation (such as access to services or physical facilities) discrimina-tion on the basis of age, color, creed, disability (mental and/or physical), gender identity, national origin, pregnancy, race, religion, sex or sexual orientation. If you believe you have been discriminated against in any program, activity or facility as described above, or if you desire further information, contact the Iowa Civil Rights Commission at 1-800-457-4416, or write to: Director, Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Wallace State Office Building, 502 E. 9th, Des Moines, Iowa 50319-0034.
Iowa Breeding Bird Atlas II Email:
http://bba.iowabirds.org
Iowa Department of Natural ResourcesBoone Wildlife Research Station
1436 255th StreetBoone, Iowa 50036
Phone: (515)432-2823 Fax: (515)432-2835
Website:http://www.iowadnr.gov/
Iowa Ornithologists UnionWebsite:
http://www.iowabirds.org/Listserve:
http://www.iowabirds.org/IOU/IA-BIRD.asp
June 24-26, Rathbun LakeAppanoose, Lucas, Monroe, and Wayne counties
July 8-10, Northeastern IowaAllamakee, Clayton, Fayette, and Winneshiek counties
July 22-24, Northwestern IowaClay, Dickinson, Emmet, Lyon, Osceola, and Palo Alto counties
July 29-31, Southwestern IowaFremont, Mills, Montgomery, Page, Pottawattamie counties
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Clay, Dickinson, Emmet, Lyon, Osceola, and Palo Alto counties
