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BIRDWATCH By John Thaxton On the way down to Elizabethtown for a Christmas Bird Count, I suddenly found myself slamming on my brakes really hard in order to avoid running over 15 or so wild turkeys wandering around aimlessly on Route 9N—they looked like a group of overly serious philosophers contemplating a profound existential enigma,…
By Mike Lynch
Fishing Brook has the feel of a brook deep in the backcountry. The air is often thick with bugs and the sounds of birds. Beaver dams clog the waterway, creating meadows. Yellow wildflowers—swamp candles—light up the shorelines. Brook trout swim in the shadows.
New York is undergoing its third Breeding Bird Atlas, a five-year citizen science project that helps track our avian neighbors across the state.
Started in Vermont in partnership with the Tree Farm forestry certification program and other agencies, the warbler effort aims to knock some of the Northeast’s dense forests back into an earlier succession that favors certain birds and the insects they eat.
By Ben Westcott
The report determined that 64 percent of North American bird species are at risk of extinction from climate change. On a more hopeful note, the study found that acting to hold warming to no more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since pre-industrial levels—the most ambitious of three scenarios considered in the report—could reduce the vulnerability of 70 percent of these at-risk species.
In early October, Wildlife Veterinarian and Biologist Nina Schoch led a group of enthusiasts to catch, study and band Northern Saw-whet owls after dark at the John Brown Farm state historic site in Lake Placid in the Adirondacks.
By Phil Brown
This summer the state Department of Environmental Conservation released spruce grouse in the area of Blue Mountain Road. The birds were captured in Maine and Ontario.
For the past 44 years a small group of hardy volunteers has encamped each May on the peninsula at the Crown Point State Historic Site in the shadow of ancient forts—ground where Samuel de Champlain, Benedict Arnold, Ethan Allen and great Native American chiefs once trod.
Audubon New York, Audubon Vermont and forestry experts from both states will educate attendees on declining bird populations and what can be done to help them.
The Christmas count is one of the longest running and expansive “citizen science” programs, in which amateurs collect data to be used in legitimate scientific research. The accessibility of the program has allowed thousands of people to contribute to one of the largest databases about bird activity in North America for more than a century.