As you’ve seen in my previous posts, there are some big issues facing boreal forests and the birds that live there both as summer migrants and year-round. These issues include habitat loss and fragmentation, as well as the impacts of climate change. Some researchers have suggested that we need to protect large areas of important […]
Archive for the ‘birds’ Tag
Keeping the boreal forest in tune
A swiftly changing forest
In my last post, I talked about the impacts of forest loss and fragmentation on boreal birds. These issues impact birds whether they are year-round residents or summer visitors, and the impacts can be pretty intense- Sauer et al. (2005) estimated that the boreal chickadee population experienced an annual decline of about 3.6% between 1966 […]
If a tree falls in the boreal forest, do the birds pay attention?
When we think of boreal forests, we may think of dense networks of coniferous trees covering the landscape, but the reality is a bit more complicated than that- in addition to deciduous trees in the understory and canopy and bodies of water of all shapes and sizes, boreal forests are mosaics with patches of different […]
What flies in a northern forest?
In July I had the opportunity to attend the North American Congress on Conservation Biology in Madison, Wisconsin. In addition to having a blast in the cooler weather and meeting researchers doing amazing work, I also was reminded that the boreal forests of the world are huge- in fact, they are much, much bigger than […]
Making room for seabirds
Over the last few weeks I’ve described some of the problems facing colonial seabirds around the world (and some of them are pretty serious), but I’ve also pointed out that we are making progress at fighting some of these challenges. Birds in general get a lot of attention from researchers and the public- they are […]
Removing obstacles for colonial seabirds
Drama on the seas and islands and beaches
Danger in numbers?
As we start 2016, I’m trying to be more conscious of conservation issues that I interact with on a regular basis but might not really spend a lot of time contemplating in detail. For example, I know that carbon dioxide emissions are a major cause of global warming, so I try to turn off lights […]
A word for the wise
I spend a lot of my time in an urban area with lights on every corner and sirens as my nightly serenade, but I have lived in areas where I could listen to owls calling to each other in the darkness. I was reminded of that fact a few days ago while looking at specimens […]