House sparrow effect

House sparrows build nests in natural and man-made cavities, like this box provided by a cable company. Photo by Mark Gorges.

House sparrow effect demonstrated in backyard

Published July 7, 2023, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.

By Barb Gorges

            I blame the puppy.

            When she joined our family last September, I thought it would be a good idea to feed the birds hulled sunflower seeds so that there wouldn’t be hulls under the feeder for her to chew.

            I noticed over the winter that we had more house sparrows visiting us than usual. Normally, few ever bothered to crack open our usual black oil sunflower seeds. They might look around under the feeder for scraps, but they don’t usually sit on the feeder pulling out seeds.

            Turns out they really like sunflower seeds – if they don’t have to deal with the hulls. And with more hanging around, more of them thought about nesting here, but not for the first time.

            Last year, after the robins fledged one batch of young and laid one or two eggs for the next, the house sparrows started building their nest on top. They completely covered the robin eggs with a hollow ball of dry grass stems. The robins left. We took the whole mess down. House sparrows are one of three non-native bird species in the U.S. that are legal to disturb or kill without a permit, the others being starlings and pigeons, probably for agricultural reasons originally.

            This year, we were happy to see the robins return to the ledge over our back door. It looked like the eggs hatched mid-May, about the time we left on a trip. The puppy left, too, so I didn’t worry about her picking up any fledglings falling out of the nest.

           When we came home, the nest was empty. Mark took it down so the house sparrows wouldn’t take it over – the world does not need more house sparrows. Originally native to Europe and Asia, they have done a wonderful job of colonizing the globe, except for Antarctica.

            I was surprised that the robins didn’t want to nest on our ledge a second time. They seemed to have abandoned our yard. On the other hand, every time I stood at the kitchen sink and looked out the window, there would be a male house sparrow on the wire, sometimes with dry grass in his beak. He would fly off somewhere to the left, out of sight.

            Late June, Mark and I were standing not far from the robins’ favorite inner corner of our house exterior. We were discussing exactly where to set up a kennel to keep the puppy (and garden) safe when we aren’t outside with her.

            Barely 6 feet from the robins’ favorite ledge are various electrical boxes hanging on the wall. I noticed one had a long piece of dead grass sticking out from the bottom. We opened it and found it half full of dry grass and a dozen feathers, and four tiny eggs. House sparrow eggs.

            Dry grass and electrical connections are not a good combination. We cleaned out the box and put duct tape over the hole in the bottom where the wires, and house sparrows, entered it.

            Within hours, we had robins in the yard again. They were our robins, the ones that don’t spook or attack us when we cross paths in the backyard. Within two days, there was most of a robin nest rebuilt on the ledge.

            Some of the dry grass the robins collected they pulled from the spots where puppy pee has killed the lawn, so we have the puppy to thank for making building materials so accessible.

            For years, I’ve heard that as cute as invasive house sparrows are, they steal nesting cavities from native birds like bluebirds, or the red-breasted nuthatches that nested across the street in a tree hollow the last two years. This year house sparrows have it.

           Otherwise, I’ve never seen a house sparrow nest in the wild, except for the old hollow trees in one corner of Lions Park. Mostly I’ve seen their messy nests sticking out of large commercial signs and other cavities of the human-built environment.

            This recent experience shows that house sparrows can interfere with nesting by birds that don’t use cavities, like robins.

            On to the next mystery: Why am I seeing gulls in Cheyenne this summer? Usually, they don’t get any closer to town than the landfill. There must be a new source of food around here, either trash or fish.

            Oh, and I saw a hummingbird in Lions Park at the back of the amphitheater. It was inspecting the railings, maybe for spider webs for making a nest? It’s about four weeks earlier than we see hummingbirds in town when they return from nesting in the mountains.

Puffin paradise

Atlantic puffin was the target species for the participants on a bird tour of mid-coast Maine last month. Photo by Mark Gorges.

Published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle June 9, 2023

Puffin paradise tour held along mid-coast Maine

By Barb Gorges

            This year is the 50^th anniversary of Project Puffin. The story is there were no Atlantic puffins left along the coast of Maine—too many egg collectors—and one man, Stephen Kress, dreamed up a way to successfully bring them back.

            Kress was spending time on Hog Island, at the Audubon camp, when he became intrigued by the puffin problem. He arranged to bring pufflings back from Canada, where there were plenty. He improvised a frame filled with tin cans to imitate the burrows they were hatched in and carried them back where he had excavated burrows on Eastern Egg Rock, not far from the Audubon camp.

            Puffins are supposed to return to the colony where they fledge, but when these birds were old enough to return to breed, they didn’t seem to want to hang out at Eastern Egg Rock. Kress decided they needed to see that it was a popular place to live, so he set up puffin decoys and eventually established a thriving colony.

            The lessons learned with Project Puffin have been applied to troubled seabird colonies all over the world. More than a dozen different kinds of seabird decoys are manufactured at Audubon’s mainland property across from Hog Island. Made of long-lasting hand-painted molded plastic, they are shipped around the world.

            Project Puffin, www.projectpuffin.audubon.org, is now part of Audubon’s Seabird Institute. Mark and I were fortunate to be on a Holbrook Travel tour to Hog Island late May to see the puffins and other seabirds and to hear a talk by Don Lyons, the institute’s director.

            Lyons talked about the evolution of technology for tracking birds, from biologging tags to geolocators. The new Motus Wildlife Tracking System makes use of fixed stations set up around the world to record birds wearing trackers as they pass by.

            Lyons told us about the Aleutian terns that nest in Alaska and winter in Indonesia. Before tracking, people in Indonesia thought they were seeing common terns in the winter. Many terns in winter plumage look similar.

So much more is known now about where birds go, and where they might be heading into disaster, such as proposed off-shore windfarms. Not only can birds collide with wind turbine blades, but some are lost trying to avoid wind farm turbulence blocking their traditional migration route.

But it’s not just migration. Many seabirds spend almost their entire lives aloft. When they breed in a colony, to feed their young they are often gone for several days, flying hundreds of miles to collect enough food from the sea.

The Seabird Institute can share information so that with a little tweaking, perhaps these long-distance fliers won’t need restoration like the puffins.

This summer, four researchers are voluntarily stranded on Eastern Egg Rock. It has no trees, just a few observation blinds and one little shack for keeping electronics safe. When they saw our boat, they jumped up on the roof and waved. We did not go ashore but with binoculars we saw 45 puffins on the rock and around us swimming and flying.

We saw other breeding seabirds and shorebirds. That day’s trip gave me four “life birds” (species I’d never seen before): the Atlantic puffin, purple sandpiper, razorbill (a puffin’s close relative) and roseate tern, my 690^th life bird.

It was a beautiful sunny day, with water calmer than we had hoped for. And as always, it was fun meeting and travelling with other devoted birders and to make it to Hog Island, of which we’d heard so much as Audubon members the last 40-plus years. And the food was excellent, culminating in a Maine lobster dinner.

There were eight legs to our journey home: the pontoon ferry to the mainland, car ride to the bus stop in Damariscotta, two buses, the plane, a cart ride most of the nearly mile-long length of DIA’s B terminal to make our Fort Collins bus connection, and the drive home.

I was disappointed that my smart phone battery seemed to be draining rapidly. I couldn’t figure out where to plug it in on the plane so I could keep reading the book I downloaded. So, at nine percent I shut it down.

The next day, as I set my GPS app to measure how far I was walking, I realized the app had tracked my trip home.

There was the orange line leaving Hog Island, the winding road to the bus stop in Damariscotta, all the bridges over inlets, wetlands and rivers of mid-coast Maine. And then the plane banking over Boston and the Atlantic before setting a straight line across southern Ontario until it ended over Lake Michigan when I shut the phone off.

The Hog Island Audubon Camp’s chef makes these puffins for the celebratory dinner dessert. Photo by Barb Gorges.