State College Bird Club ZOOM Meeting
December 13, 2023


Presiding: Doug Wentzel

Recording: Peggy Wagoner Saporito

Attendance:42

Meeting Format: Zoom

Treasurer’s report:(Karen Kottlowski):

SCBC balance in the checking account is $4853.00 and savings account is $5575.85. Joe Gyekis requested that his September presentation honorarium of $100 be donated to Clearwater Conservancy, which was done.
 
Announcements/Other Activities:

The listserv continues to be a wonderful source of information. For example, the daily hawkwatch updates informed us that today, the seasonal total of golden eagles seen at the Bald Eagle hawk watch exceeded 200. Though this is a lower count than previous seasons, all of the local watches are seeing fewer GE this year as compared to previous years, perhaps due to the mild fall and fewer days with ideal winds for viewing the migration.

Margaret Brittingham is coordinating Project Feeder Watch at the Penn State Arboretum and will be holding a training in January. Anyone interested in volunteering to help with the watch can contact Doug for more information.

Upon a request from American Bird Conservancy, the SCBC board approved our club’s signing a letter of support for bipartisan legislation which would increase funding for neotropical migratory bird conservation through the “Migratory Birds of the Americas Conservation Enhancements Act of 2023 (H.R. 4389).

The Giving Tuesday campaign for “Penn State Sustainability and Insect Biodiversity” that Joe Gyekis championed to help make PSU campus more bird friendly (reduce unnecessary lights at night and reduce bird window collisions) was a resounding success. More than 400 individuals gave over $16,000, demonstrating the public interest and concern for bird safety on campus.

Doug is looking for volunteers to help with our tables at events such as Crickfest and Millbrook Marsh where we represent SCBC. If interested in helping with tabling or providing your artistic or other talents for these events, contact Doug.

Christmas Bird Counts will be starting soon. Good luck to everyone who will be heading out later this month.

Julia Plummer gave us some information about the upcoming PA Breeding Bird Atlas activities, a 5-year project to evaluate breeding and wintering bird populations that will officially kick off on January 1, 2024. We will hear more details at a future club meeting when Amber Weiwel, the coordinator will give SCBC a presentation in the spring. Julia is the regional coordinator for the Allegheny Plateau which includes Centre, Clearfield, Clinton and other northern counties.

The “Notable Bird Sightings” segment took a hiatus this month.

Speaker: Steph Szarmach: “Tracking the Migration of Myrtle Warblers in Alaska and British Columbia”

(This entire presentation can be viewed at:) https://psu.zoom.us/rec/share/HdQwImpixsixyps2QU2LifdWLKZTcLdsy1rAAZS9CdlcOdnQWUB7s9tFu2DFwJeO.X6R6Qz1KLiw9csts

Steph, a PhD candidate in the Toews Lab at Penn State is studying evolution and genomics of avian migration. She presented a brief overview of migration in general and the specifics of myrtle warbler (a northern subspecies of yellow-rumped warbler) migration.  Steph focused on the interesting work she is doing to track myrtle warbler (MW) migration routes using more recently developed tracking techniques that can improve our understanding of migration.

For thousands of years, humans have been curious about where birds go in the winter, coming up with mostly wild and a few accurate theories. During the past century, methods of tracking birds (such as banding, radio telemetry and GPS satellite transmitters) greatly increased our understanding. However, with each of these methods there are drawback such as low recovery of banded birds, need for proximity to tagged birds for radio telemetry, and size limitations with GPS satellite transmitters that can only be deployed on larger birds.

Recently developed tracking techniques and devices include geolocators which can be deployed on small birds such as warblers, and stable isotope analysis which looks at ratios of hydrogen isotopes in feathers to help identify the location of the birds when the feathers were grown.

Tracking has shown that within some species, individuals or populations take different migration routes and use different wintering locations. MW breed across much of the northern portions of North America from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts.  However, they winter in two distinct areas in the US: one along the Gulf and southern Atlantic coastal states and another along the west coast in California and south into Mexico. Based on the slightly larger size among birds breeding in Alaska and those wintering in California compared to MW found further east, there has been a long standing proposal that MW breeding in Alaska, winter along the west coast in California. Steph’s research is helping to determine if this is in fact the case.

Steph described her research activities during the summer of 2022 in Alaska and northern Canada. Using mist nets to capture MW in a park adjacent to Anchorage Alaska, she measured, sampled and banded 54 MW. Thirty of the birds were also fitted with geolocators, the other 24 were control birds to determine if the presence of geolocators were detrimental. These devices measured time, light, air pressure and temperature during the year as the birds migrated south for the winter and returned to Alaska for summer breeding. Steph also collected feathers for stable isotope analysis from MW that she mist-net-captured along the Alaska highway from Anchorage to Toad River BC.

To retrieve the data from geolocators, Steph returned to Alaska in summer 2023 to recapture birds she had banded and fitted with geolocators. There was a 20% return rate of both birds that had been fitted with geolocators in 2022 and those that had not received the devices, indicating that the presence of geolocators did not have a negative impact on the birds.

Six of the 30 deployed geolocators were collected and analyzed. Light level and air pressure data were especially useful in determining the migration route taken by each of these six birds and their wintering locations. Surprisingly, all six tracked birds migrated to the Gulf coast, not to California as theorized. All followed a similar migration route, east through western Canada and then southeast across the US.

Air pressure data were especially useful to more precisely trace the migration paths of each of the six recaptured birds fitted with geolocators. Using this data, Steph was able to determine migration timing, flight altitude (average 3,000 ft, maximum 10,000 ft), location and amount of time spent at each migration stopover and wintering area.

The stable isotope analysis of feathers collected from 179 MW in Anchorage Alaska, British Columbia and Alberta indicated that the majority were likely wintering in the southeastern US. However, a few birds showed a high likelihood of wintering on the West coast.

Based on Steph’s research it appears that some birds from Alaska and western Canada may migrate to the West Coast. However, since most of the birds she tracked via geolocators and stable isotope analysis wintered along the Gulf coast, there is no clear-cut migratory divide as had previously been proposed.