Extinction looms for two rare birds after devastating hurricanes

Conservationists race to save remaining populations

Conservation biologist Paul Reillo is torn between two worlds in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria — one of swift action and one of waiting.

There is little time to rest. More than 200 animals, many fighting extinction, are relying on him. The FIU scientist is the founder of the Rare Species Conservatory Foundation (RSCF), a partner in FIU's Tropical Conservation Institute (TCI), which offers safe haven, captive breeding programs and field-based conservation to help save endangered species. In a matter of two weeks, two species of birds on the brink of extinction were dealt devastating blows when hurricanes Irma and Maria crossed the Caribbean, leaving devastation in their wakes. The team at the Tropical Conservation Institute knows it is facing an unprecedented conservation crisis.

Working

Hurricane Irma caused more than $200,000 in damages at RSCF's property in Loxahatchee, Fla. Little could be done to save enclosures and fences from the storm, but Reillo and his team secured the animals, including 40 endangered east African bongo antelopes, 35 primates including endangered golden lion tamarins, nearly 100 parrots representing a variety of threatened and endangered species and 42 critically endangered Florida grasshopper sparrows.

The TCI team is putting in long hours to rebuild what was destroyed at the RSCF facility and to help the animals recover from the stress brought on by the storm. The Florida grasshopper sparrows are the greatest cause for concern. It is the world's most endangered bird with less than 100 remaining in the wild before Irma. The team fears the hurricane has crippled the wild population which resides exclusiv
ely in the prairie grasses of Central Florida. They are working with state and federal wildlife officials on strategies to help preserve the small number of birds that remain on the planet.

Waiting

Meanwhile, Reillo is waiting for news about Dominica's critically endangered Imperial Amazon.

Since the late 1990s, he has been working with Dominica's Forestry, Wildlife and Parks Division to help restore the rare parrot's population in the wild which has been devastated by habitat loss, the pet trade and natural disasters. In 2000, the local government established a national park to protect critical habitat for the rare parrot species. Reillo raised many of the funds himself to purchase the land necessary for the initiative.

Hurricane Maria, in a matter of a single day, destroyed more than 20 years of work to save the species.

"The flagship species we have fought to save for so many years may now face imminent extinction," Reillo said, pausing for a rare break from post-hurricane clean-up.

When Maria marched across the Caribbean, the expansive forests of the island were decimated. Tree canopies were gutted and critical habitat for the Imperial Amazon was destroyed. Dominica is among the most hardest hit countries by the recent spate of storms that attacked the Caribbean. Fewer than 250 mature Imperial Amazons were known to populate the forests of Dominica before Maria. Local forestry officials have been looking for any signs that some of the rare parrots weathered the storm, but the bird is elusive and difficult to find under normal circumstances. These are not normal circumstances.

"TCI's fight to save endangered species is critical," said Mike Heithaus, dean of FIU's College of Arts, Sciences & Education, which houses TCI. "Recent hurricanes have proven how very vulnerable many species are. Our programs can make the difference between an animal being here and not, but the monumental task before us is going to require tremendous local, national and international support."

Even if Imperial Amazons survived, the catastrophic destruction of the island's richly biodiverse forests is causing alarm for conservationists. Locals have spotted the more common Jaco parrot among the gutted forests, but those are struggling to find food. Their plight represents a much larger crisis looming over Dominica's wildlife and especially the Imperial Amazons.

Reillo believes the Imperial Amazon still has a fighting chance. For now, the focus is on getting supplies to the island including tarps, chainsaws, tools and veterinary supplies. Researchers and forestry officials are still trying to assess the status of the population and develop a strategy for recovery. The FIU Tropical Conservation Institute team is preparing for an aggressive plan that Reillo knows will come at a significant cost. But the alternative — loss of another flagship species — poses a far greater cost to the health of the planet.

For the love of birds

Any bird lovers out there? The change into the autumn season awakens the wonder of migratory birds on the wing once again, and with expectations we watch the sky for the first arrivals from the north.

At the same time, in this fiery fall of 2017, we watch the sky for smoke — the devilish byproduct of fire — and hope the waterfowl and other wanderers can endure the toxic atmosphere. Let the flames cease!

Of all the nature categories, birds have been one of the greatest attractions to me, a passion kindled during my Missouri boyhood days. Through the Missouri Department of Conservation, I became a Nature Knight, a program for kids, and was supplied with field guides, obtained a cheap monocular, and became obsessed with identifying a host of birds, as any bird watcher experiences when confronted with flocks of feathered friends.

When some of those vicious Midwestern storms pounded wind, lightning, and thunder into the night, I would lay in bed and wonder how those delicate bird beings could survive out there in the dark. I still think of the bird's crisis in extreme weather, or wildfires, 80 years later in Oroville.

Amazingly, next morning after a storm, the little sparrows, juncos, quail, and jays are there, going about their food-gathering ways like the beginning of a new day!

Prodded by that concern for resident winter birds in the Heartland, I would load my sled with lespedeza and grains after a big snow, and plow my way to a grove of eastern red cedar at the edge of Floyd's Timber. The cedar's low sprawling evergreen branches provided a shelter of sorts where I would lay out my offerings and hope no fox or weasel caught on. The adjoining woods were alive with squawking blue jay and jubilant cardinal and juncos that descended on my offerings.

Just imagine clutching a branch with thin legs as wind whips the woods furiously, and stinging rain — and sometimes hail — pelts the birds as if with a will to bring them down. You wonder if they feel fear, or worry about life itself.

Equally, what do the thicket birds do when flood or snow covers up their food supply, or a forest fire destroys their habitat? Shrubs such as buckbrush in California are very important shelters for ground birds, but its doubly tragic when the flame-monster destroys that benefit. There is doubling up on habitat, too, if they can escape on wings in time.

In the same vein, coral-berry brush, scattered weed patches, and fence rows were life savers for Missouri birds when winter weather raged.

There is always the presence of predators, even at night with the owl and fox on the prowl. Regardless of sympathy expressed by those who know birds and care, it is a dangerous jungle out there for songbird and shrew alike.

Resident birds endure the winter rather than migrate like the swallows and flycatchers, and as do the waterfowl in the Pacific Flyway. Who is there that cannot feel compassion for the goose or duck winging their way through the perilous sky southward toward an ice-free marsh?

"All day thy wings have fanned,/At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere ..." said Bryant.

Of utmost concern, even pity, is the case of Anna hummingbirds that choose to remain in Oroville rather than migrate like most hummers. The flowers on which they depend are far fewer in winter, and I, as well as many others, keep sugar-water feeders out for them.

Does shooting birds make them smarter?

Human hunters may be making birds smarter by inadvertently shooting those with smaller brains. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that hunting may be exerting a powerful evolutionary force on bird populations in Denmark, and likely wherever birds are hunted. But the work also raises a red flag for some researchers who question whether the evolution of brain size can ever be tied to a single factor.

The new work “broadens an emerging view that smarts really do matter in the natural, and increasingly human-dominated, world,” says John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist and expert on crow cognition at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved with the work.

Hunting and fishing are known to affect many animal populations. For instance, the pike-perch in the Finnish Archipelago Sea has become smaller over time thanks to fishing, which typically removes the largest individuals from a population. This pressure also causes fish to reach sexual maturity earlier. On land, natural predators like arctic foxes and polar bears can also drive their prey species to become smarter because predators are most likely to catch those with smaller brains. For instance, a recent study showed that common eiders (maritime ducks) that raise the most chicks also have the largest heads and are better at forming protective neighborhood alliances than ducks with smaller heads—and presumably, brains.

Does the same hold true for birds that dodge human hunters? To find out, Anders Pape Møller, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Paris-Sud, assessed the brain sizes of 3781 birds from 197 species brought to taxidermists in Denmark between 1960 and 2015. The birds included pheasants, partridges, wood grouse, magpies, and hooded crows. Danish law requires taxidermists to record the date and cause of death of every specimen they handle. Møller’s co-author, Johannes Erritzøe, a taxidermist and ornithologist at the House of Bird Research in Christiansfeld, Denmark, autopsied each bird, noted its mass, and weighed its extracted brain. The scientists also assessed the birds’ body condition and age at death.

They found that 299, or 7.9%, of the 3781 birds were shot. Birds with smaller brains relative to their body size were shot more often, as were larger individuals (which offer a bigger target), and males (perhaps because of their brighter colors). But if a bird had a large brain relative to its body size, the probability that it would be shot decreased nearly 30-fold, the scientists report today in Biology Letters. This held true, regardless of the birds’ health, body mass, sex, and species. Hunters, they conclude, are unwittingly turning their prey into large-brained birds by eliminating those with pea-sized brains from the population.

The  scientists also compared the birds' other internal organs--heart, liver, lungs--and found that only the brain was smaller in the hunted birds. “It means that hunting has a very peculiar and specific effect on the brain and not the other bodily functions of these animals,” Møller says.

Hunters aren’t specifically targeting the smaller-brained birds, he adds. Such birds simply aren’t savvy about hunters, apparently lacking the smarts to realize that people with guns are dangerous. “They take longer to fly when approached by someone with a gun, whereas larger-brained birds enjoy the benefit of being wary.” Moller and his team couldn’t track changes in brain size over time, since hunting regulations in many of the study areas have shifted; there are some areas where it was once allowed, but it’s now banned. That could let birds with smaller brains gradually make up a larger part of the population, Møller predicts.

“The study is intriguing, but I will remain a bit sceptical because it is based on a comparative long-term data set and not an experiment,” says Jesper Madsen, a population ecologist at Aarhaus University in Rønde, Denmark, who was not involved in the study. “To conclude that hunting selects for larger brains requires more than a correlational study.”

Such an experiment is already underway—albeit inadvertently, Møller says. In the last 5 years, the hunting of snipe and curlew has been banned permanently in Europe. Scientists could compare specimens from the earlier hunting period with those collected after the ban to see if these birds are evolving smaller brains, Møller says. “That’s a predictable consequence of stopping hunting.”

Still, Madsen isn’t alone in his scepticism. “My heart drops every time I see another study like this showing a correlation between some factor and brain size,” says Susan Healy, an evolutionary biologist at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom. In 2007, she and Candy Rowe, a behavioral ecologist at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, assessed more than 50 studies that revealed a correlation between brain size and behavioral traits such as migration, deception, and female promiscuity. They concluded that this type of research did little to advance an understanding of either brain evolution or function.

Healy’s and Madsen’s concerns are valid, Marzluff says. But, he adds, the study is valuable because of the questions it raises. “For example, did smarts pay off more for some species than for others? Were similar trends seen in social versus solitary species? That’s what correlational studies do: They generate questions.”

Indeed, the authors raise several at the end of their study. To wit: If hunters are indeed making birds smarter, what will this do long-term to bird populations and to the sport of hunting itself? Will these birds be increasingly harder to catch, for example? And how would this affect wild predators that live on these species? Møller predicts they’ll have a harder time. As for the answer, stay tuned.

Saskatchewan animals preparing for fall

When it comes to priorities in Saskatchewan's animal world these days, finding enough food and a warm home for the winter are at the top of the list.

Kenton Lysak explained what large animals including moose and bears are searching for to Saskatoon Morning's Leisha Grebinski. Lysak is the Senior Interpreter at Beaver Creek Conservation Centre near Saskatoon.

"At this time, these animals are just looking for a place to hang out and eat a ton of food. They're trying to gain as much weight as possible."

Lysak has spotted a moose in the conservation area and said he has heard reports of moose sightings in recent weeks.

"These moose are looking for tasty treats and trying to get their fat and protein content up so they can survive the harsh winter months."



Birds preparing for flight

Birds are also looking to stock up on food as the temperature begins to fall in the province. 

Lysak said most birds are looking for food to help them prepare for the long migration south to warmer temperatures.

But he also pointed out that some birds stay and brave the cold prairie winter.

"The birds that stay here need as much protein and fat as possible to get through the winter months. So feeding those chickadees and other animals in your backyard do them a big benefit."