State College Bird Club Meeting
September 25, 2024


Presiding: Doug Wentzel

Recording: Peggy Wagoner Saporito

Attendance: 35 in person/10 on zoom

Meeting Format: Hybrid: In-person and Zoom

Treasurer’s report: (Karen Kottlowski):

SCBC account balances: checking: $4356.02 and savings: $5577.95. This is member renewal season. In-person members paid dues directly to Karen at the meeting. For instructions to pay dues, check our website: www.scbirdcl.org.

Announcements/Other Activities:

This meeting represented a number of firsts for SCBC. Thanks to Mandy Maguffey of Millbrook Marsh Nature Center, we held our first meeting of the 2024-25 season in the lovely, soon to be officially opened ‘Don Hamer Classroom’ in the recently renovated MMNC building. This was our first hybrid meeting with the focus primarily on our in-person audience, but questions from our zoom audience were also addressed. And Joe Gyekis pointed out this was also the first ever regular SCBC meeting to be held in a fully bird friendly building, complete with bird-safe window treatments.

Doug reminded us that the listserv continues to be a wonderful source of information about recent sightings and photos of birds as well as daily updates from the hawkwatches in our area. If you are interested in signing up, instructions are on the website. www.scbirdcl.org.

At the meeting, Doug had, available for participants to look through, a copy of the SCBC history project, a 70-page compilation of stories spanning over 80 years from our founding in 1941 through 2023 compiled by Nick Kerlin.

Don Bryant, a long-time friend and member of SCBC who shared with us his marvelous photos and knowledge of birds, particularly raptors, passed away during the summer. He was Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology as well as a great friend and colleague to Deb and Greg Grove. The Board will determine a way to honor his memory.

Bird Club Field Trips: (Kathy Bechdel - VP of Field Trips)

In her first couple of months as our new VP of Field Trips, Kathy is off to a great start with a variety of interesting field trips.  In September we’ve enjoyed trips to the heronry at Fishermen’s Paradise, led by Julia Plummer, a tour around Tudek Park with Coty Ehrenhaus for very young birders and their families, Chicory Lane Farm with Joe Gyekis  and a special members-only trip to view barn owl banding in an undisclosed location with Jon Kauffman.

Upcoming trips include October 13, exploring Haugh Family Preserve with Jon Kauffman and an out-of-county trip to Wildwood Park, Harrisburg on October 19 to be led by Rick Price of Appalachian Audubon Society. Details for all trips are on our website: www.scbirdcl.org and you can contact Kathy directly through our website with any questions.

Notable Bird Sightings (Julia Plummer): (Sept 1-25, 2024; Centre and its contiguous counties)

Highlights during the past month included:

•    Yellow crowned night heron in Lewiston,
•    a seemingly unusually large number of sightings of Connecticut warblers in the area,
•    a prothonotary warbler near Stormstown,
•    the third-year return of a rufous hummingbird at a feeder near Spring Mills,
•    buff-breasted sandpiper and American golden plover at PA Furnace road in Huntingdon county
•    and recent lesser black-backed gulls at Bald Eagle State Park.

Speaker: Mercy Melo: “Collaboration in Conservation: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work.”

Mercy is the Wildlife Management Supervisor for Pennsylvania Game Commission’s Northcentral region. Before joining the PA Game Commission, she worked extensively with Hawk Mountain Sanctuary while conducting her PhD work on the causes of population decline in American kestrels. In October 2023, Mercy gave us an interesting presentation about her PhD research which can be found in the minutes on the SCBC website. In this program, she discussed her work to build a collaborative network of universities, government agencies, and NGOs to share data and to work together towards the common goal of protecting kestrel populations over a broad geographic area.

Mercy described how she drew initial inspiration from the work of Bob and Sue Robertson who began banding raptors in the 1950’s. They were integral to the establishment of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary’s American Kestrel Project, the longest running kestrel nest box program in the country which has subsequently inspired other groups to deploy nest boxes to increase kestrel breeding success.

Kestrels are found throughout the continent but in much of their range, populations have declined significantly since the 1970’s. A myriad of factors could be contributing to this decline including, but not limited to, competition for a dwindling supply of natural nesting cavities, habitat changes, predation, decrease in prey abundance, environmental contaminants, fledgling mortality and migration mortality, West Nile Virus, collisions, and climate change.

Knowing that she could not possibly be an expert in all of the areas of study needed to help determine how these factors may be contributing to kestrel declines, Mercy built a team of experts in a variety of fields of study and a variety of locations. These included a GIS expert to look at habitat changes, an entomologist and mammalogist to address prey populations, an ecotoxicologist to study environmental contaminants, and expert in fledgling mortality and predation dynamics.

The team took advantage of zoom for online discussions and collaboration. They developed standard protocols for sampling and taking measurements to assess chick development and health, nest box status, and landscape level monitoring of prey, predators, competitors, and vegetative surveys. From all of this monitoring, Mercy knew many details of the lives of each of the kestrels she studied.

Since, in different regions, kestrels likely face different challenges, Mercy worked to develop a network of collaborators to collect data from kestrel nest boxes using the standard protocols developed by her team. Initial collaborations were within PA including the Game Commission, PSU and several private individuals. She then expanded the network to include universities, government agencies and non-profit groups, first regionally then in various locations across the US and Canada. Ultimately she had collaborators in Delaware, Virginia, Vermont, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, California, Florida, Quebec and Ontario. Using the standard protocols, all groups collected at least some subset of data that Mercy was collecting from nest boxes she monitored. This information is helping to determine causes of kestrel decline and pointing to ways of addressing the difficulties faced by this species.

Mercy emphasized the importance of citizen science such as eBird, projects NestWatch and FeederWatch, hawk watches, PA Breeding (and wintering) Bird Atlas and the long running annual Christmas Bird Count. All of these citizen science efforts contribute to our understanding of avian population dynamics and point to species of conservation concern so that actions can be taken before it’s too late to help species in decline.