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Carnegie Museum of Natural History

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60 Years, One Bird at a Time

by Mary Shidel, with special thanks to Pam Curtin, for her detailed history of the Powdermill Bird Banding Program
small bird held in a hand

On June 18, 1961, a small brown bird with hints of blue on its wings and tail left its shrubby perch or perhaps its nest and flew into a soft nylon net. Little did this Indigo Bunting know that she would be the first data point in a long history of bird banding at the Powdermill Nature Reserve. Bob Leberman carefully extracted the bunting from the net, placed it in a bag for transport, then attached a small, almost weightless metal band to her leg, and collected data for age, sex, wing length and mass. Within minutes she was out flitting through the vegetation foraging for food. This same process has continued for 60 years, one bird at a time—capture, band, collect data, and release. 

man using a scale on a table

Powdermill Nature Reserve is the biological field station of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. In 1961, Bob Leberman, who had experience banding birds in Erie and near his hometown of Meadville, Pennsylvania, was hired by the museum’s director, Dr. Graham Netting, to establish a banding program at the Nature Reserve. Over the first decade or so the program evolved as Bob experimented with net sizes and placement, and honed skills and techniques for ageing and sexing that are still widely used today. In September 1961, a large pond was constructed and christened “Crisp Pond” after the village that used to exist nearby, and in 1975 two smaller ponds were added with shallower habitat for wading birds. 

white building with tall evergreen trees behind it

In the early days, Bob banded from mid-March to mid-November. It wasn’t until 1974, when a permanent residence was established at the reserve for him, that Bob became the first person in the country to band year-round. By 1970, as Bob’s research expanded, a nearby garage and service building were repurposed into a laboratory and office space for the Banding Program.

A 1967 publication of the Carnegie Museum notes that “one of the most valuable assets” of Powdermill Bird Banding is the “considerable effort made to keep data consistent and comparable.” This is still true sixty years later. Just as Bob did in the early days, nets are opened one half hour before sunrise and checked every forty minutes (or adjusted if necessary due to weather conditions). Nets are kept in the same exact location from year to year, and net lanes are trimmed frequently to keep the vegetation surrounding the nets in an early successional state rather than just letting the forest overtake the banding area. 

close up of measuring a bird's wing

Data consistency and integrity is also still paramount at the banding lab. Over the years, very few people have held the “bander in charge” position, and those collecting the data work closely to calibrate measurements and methods. Amazingly, of the 800,000 records now in the banding database, Bob Leberman, who retired in 2004, collected the data for almost half! In 1983, Bob Mulvihill, whose connection to the banding program began as a volunteer four years earlier, joined Bob Leberman as Powdermill’s second full-time bander. Through the efforts of both “Bobs” the program grew and expanded.  In 2004, in a recognition of ongoing research projects beyond the scope of the bird banding program, the lab was renamed “Powdermill Avian research Center,” a name frequently abbreviated as PARC.

The number of people who have supported the banding program in small and great ways over the years is much too vast to name here, but the program could never have grown and flourished without the thousands of volunteer hours and strong support from the staff at both Carnegie Museum of Natural History and Powdermill Nature Reserve. Generous funding from private donors and foundations over the years has extended the influence of PARC both nationally and globally.     

person walking next to a mist net

Today, PARC is under the direction of Lucas DeGroote, Avian Research Coordinator, with Annie Lindsay, Banding Program Manager, directing day-to-day operations at the Banding Lab. Countless avenues of research focus on finding new ways to help birds. Each banding day, Annie and her staff will be opening nets before sunrise, checking the nets every forty minutes, and safely collecting and measuring the birds, growing the database and avian knowledge, one bird at a time. 

And so the tradition continues…

Mary Shidel is a Banding Assistant at Powdermill Nature Reserve, Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s environmental research center. Museum employees blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

Blog author: Shidel, Mary
Publication date: November 5, 2021

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The Christmas Bird Count During an Irruption Year

Since 1900, the National Audubon Society has hosted the Christmas Bird Count (CBC), a fun day for birders and bird watchers of all skill levels to get outside and count everything they see and hear within a designated count circle. The CBC was started with the purpose of creating a new way of censusing winter birds. Before binoculars and optics were widely available, people used shotguns during a competition to see who could bring back the biggest pile of birds and mammals. In 1900, conservationists developed a non-destructive way to tally what they saw, and the Christmas Bird Count was born. The CBC’s initial 25 count circles have blossomed into coverage across the continent, in Central and South America, and to the Pacific Islands.

Each year, Powdermill Nature Reserve sponsors the Rector, PA Christmas Bird Count. This year, with some extra pandemic-related safety precautions, an intrepid group of local birders will canvass a 15-mile diameter circle centered just a bit north of Powdermill on Sunday, December 20. Upcoming counts promise to be interesting and exciting locally and across much of North America due to the irruption of many species of “winter finches.”

So, what is an irruption and what birds might we expect to see during an irruption year? Irruptive migration happens most often when there’s a change in food availability over much of a species’ normal range. It’s less predictable than the annual migration that we observe every spring and fall, and often happens in a cyclical pattern, reflecting normal changes in abundance of food items. Species that breed in the far north and winter generally farther north than Pennsylvania are those most likely to be irruptive migrants. When there is a poor seed crop, birds that eat things like conifer seeds, such as Pine Siskins, Red-breasted Nuthatches, and Evening Grosbeaks, as well as birds that prey upon small seed-eating animals, such as Snowy Owls, are often seen south of their typical range. This year has already proven to be a major irruption year and the season has barely begun!

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Red-breasted nuthatch

At the beginning of September, we started to see Red-breasted Nuthatches at Powdermill in higher numbers than in previous years. They were followed in early October by large flocks of Pine Siskins, small finches that look a bit like streaky goldfinches. Although many remain in the area, quite a few siskins continued south and are currently flocking to feeders in the Carolinas and beyond! Even more exciting was the influx of Evening Grosbeaks, which first appeared in mid-October. This species’ population is in steep decline: these birds used to be commonly seen here in the winter until about 30-35 years ago, but now visit during only the biggest irruption years.

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Pine Siskin
Northern Saw-whet Owl. Photo credit: Catherine Werth

Northern Saw-whet Owls are a species that we generally see each year, but this year banders are catching more than usual. One evening at Powdermill the team caught eight individuals, three of which were foreign recaptures! (This term refers to birds that were banded and recaptured at different banding stations. The three owls from that evening came from northeastern Pennsylvania, southeastern Ontario, and, for a bird initially banded four years ago, western Virginia.) Even familiar and common species that we see year-round but that have ranges that extend far north, such as Black-capped Chickadees and Purple Finches, are being seen in higher numbers this year.

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Common Redpoll

What species can we expect next? Red Crossbills and Common Redpolls haven’t been reported in the Powdermill area yet but are creeping ever closer, and if we’re really lucky perhaps we may even spot White-winged Crossbills, Pine Grosbeaks, or Hoary Redpolls. So, keep your eyes peeled, your ears primed for unfamiliar calls, your binoculars polished, and a field guide nearby, and you may have a spectacular Christmas Bird Count season!

For more information about the Christmas Bird Count, please visit: https://www.audubon.org/conservation/join-christmas-bird-count

And for a fun kickoff to the Christmas Bird Count season, Powdermill avian researchers, along with colleagues and a very special guest, will be hosting a watch party of the movie The Big Year the evening of December 18. For more information and to register: https://carnegiemnh.org/event/the-big-year-watch-party/

Annie Lindsay is the Bird Banding Program Manager at Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Powdermill Nature Reserve. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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Wind and Migration

Spring is just around the corner, even if it doesn’t feel like it the last few days.  In the Laurel Highlands, the trout lilies and trillium are blooming, the closed umbrella forms of May apples are poking through the leaf litter, and the migrating birds are on their way.  Some are already here.  For many birders, spring is the most exciting time of year.  We’ve waited months to see something different, all dressed up fancy and bright after growing new feathers over the winter.  We also get a chance to see some birds as they lay over, northward bound to the boreal forest or arctic tundra.   So, when will they be here?  That depends on two things: time and wind.

Birds want to arrive as soon as there’s food to eat so they can stake their claim on a nice plot of land to raise a family.  Since the tundra is still frozen, birds that breed there, like the Grey-cheeked Thrush, won’t be coming until around the second week of May.  Louisiana Waterthrushes on the other hand, arrived the beginning of April, as soon as insects were flying along the mountain streams they call home.  Both species know when to depart their wintering grounds based on daylength, honed over thousands of years through natural selection.

Gray-cheeked Thrush

Louisiana Waterthrush

The other thing birds base their decision to leave upon is weather, specifically wind.  And it effects how many migrants might be arriving on a particular day at a particular place.  Put another way, birds’ instincts effect the range of dates they arrive, weather influences the specific dates.

How is wind important? Hawks soar using thermals (warm air rising from heated land masses) or ridges (wind pushed up by ridges). Songbirds on the other hand, migrate at night and fly when the winds are light or are in the direction they are heading (when they literally have a tail wind). Because low pressure systems spin counter-clockwise fall migrants will move after a low front passes in the fall or before a low front arrives in the spring. We like to use Hint.fm wind maps to help predict when and where migrants can move. Besides being informative, these maps show the beautiful complexity of wind patterns.

You might now be wondering how we use these maps. Let’s use Sept 19th, 2012 as an example. At 1pm EST there are light, southerly winds along the eastern seaboard and throughout the Southeast. There are also strong southerly winds in the western part of the Midwest. If you imagine that these patterns will slowly move eastward (say half an inch by sunset) you might predict strong migration for the eastern seaboard, the southeast, and the Midwest.

If you made such a prediction you would be right, but you don’t have to take our word for it. It turns out that birds taking off and migrating at night are picked up on radar. Here’s a radar loop from 5pm EST Sept 19th to 1:40am EST Sept 20th. At the very beginning you can see storm systems across Wisconsin and Iowa. As the frames progress you can see intense circular “clouds” appearing across the east, Southeast, and Midwest. These “clouds” are millions of birds taking off after sunset and continuing to migrate throughout the night. They’re circular because they are centered around each radar. We call these appearances “blooms” because they blossom around the radar sites.

Notice that where the storm system is and several hundred miles to the east (about an inch) there aren’t any blooms. That’s because this is the area which is experiencing strong northerly winds. Rather than fighting the headwind, birds in this area are staying put until more favorable winds come through. The winds along the gulf appear to be favorable for a trans-gulf crossing and you can see the clouds of birds take off and begin to move off the gulf coast shoreline (especially Texas). Looking at the longer loop from 3pm EST the 19th to 2pm EST the 20th you can also see birds taking off in Illinois and Iowa after the front has passed through.

What about the spring you ask?  Remember, since the low-pressure systems spin counter clockwise birds migrate ahead of a front.  A few days ago, the night of April 11th, there were southerly winds resulting in good movement northward across the southeastern U.S.  Looking ahead, the next significant warm-up with nightly, light, southerly winds won’t occur until next week, mid-week (around Tuesday April 21st). If piecing together wind patterns and radar isn’t your thing, Cornell Lab of Ornithology has you covered.  They’ve put together something they call BirdCast which puts combines weather, radar, and bird data (ebird) to forecast bird migration for the U.S.

Ruby-crowned Kinglet

We may be quarantined but that doesn’t mean we have to miss the magic of migration.  As I write, there’s a ruby-crowned kinglet singing in a maple across the street.  We can bird, or learn birds, in our backyard or neighborhood.  We can bird a new local patch and contribute what we see to science by logging our sightings into ebird.com.  Over the last few years people in Pennsylvania have found some amazing birds in their own backyard.  A Black-backed Oriole from Mexico, a Painted Bunting which overshot the Carolinas by more than a few states, and even a Bahama Woodstar.  With migration, we never know exactly what we’re going to get.  To me that’s part of the magic.  That, and knowing that it’s time for them to come, carried hundreds or even thousands of miles by their wings and the wind.

Luke DeGroote is the avian research coordinator at Powdermill Nature Reserve, Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s environmental research center. Museum staff, volunteers, and interns are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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Behind the Scenes…a Life in the Details

Perhaps on a past visit to the museum you have noticed the large, heavy wooden doors and wondered what lay beyond. You might have seen staff members using these doors to access the mysterious spaces beyond and wondered what they do.  Maybe when you think of the museum, you think in terms of its ‘collections,’ which are vast—specimens, artifacts, dinosaur bones, gems, and more. Indeed, many of the museum staff do manage the collections, tirelessly cataloguing, preparing, and preserving our Natural History.

This past January, we had the opportunity to celebrate the work of Marilyn Niedermeier who was employed at the museum for almost 43 years! In a quiet corner of the third floor, behind a door labeled “Section of Birds,” Marilyn spent her career caring for a collection of data.

Since 2007, Marilyn was the person in charge of data gathered at the Bird Banding Lab at Powdermill Nature Reserve, the Carnegie Museum’s scientific research station in the Laurel Highlands, about an hour (58 miles) southeast of Oakland.

Started in 1961, the Powdermill Avian Research Center bands about 10,000 birds per year and processes another 3-4,000 recaptured birds (already banded). Marilyn’s job was to organize, proof, catalogue and submit those data to the National Banding Lab. How did she do all that from 58 miles away, and what does that collection of data look like?

In the early days, long before the invention of desktop computers, Powdermill data were handwritten on paper data sheets which were hand-delivered to the museum up until 2010! Although they rarely met face-to-face, Bob Leberman (founder of the banding program) and Marilyn frequently exchanged hand-written letters to resolve discrepancies in the data.  Reports to the banding lab were prepared on a typewriter and snail-mailed to Maryland.

Over the years, as the database grew bird by bird, Marilyn witnessed many changes in the way the data was handled, from the antiquated computer punch cards (so advanced for the time) to the evolving world of desktop computing. As the binders filled up with datasheets, Marilyn navigated through several iterations of software needed to maintain the growing database and soon hand-written letters were replaced by email and eventually the data sheets were replaced by a direct-entry program at the Powdermill banding lab. Even with direct-entry of data, it doesn’t end there. The data must still be checked for accuracy and consistency and then submitted to the national lab.

For the over two decades, Marilyn worked tirelessly, with a ready smile, under a sign above her desk that read “No one notices what I do until I don’t do it!” Through her efforts and that of the scientists at Powdermill who faithfully collect the data each banding day, the dataset of the Powdermill Avian Research Center is one of the largest and most accurate in the country. Marilyn, we wanted to say, “We noticed,” and we couldn’t have done it without you!

Mary Shidel is a Field Assistant at Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Powdermill Nature Reserve. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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Adult Flycatcher

Adult Flycatcher

This adult Flycatcher undergoes the pre-basic molt of the wintering grounds. These adults can be readily identified by their white bars and wear on the feather tips.

Powdermill Nature Reserve’s avian research center is part of Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s biological research station in Rector, Pennsylvania.  The research center operates a bird banding station, conducts bioacoustical research, and performs flight tunnel analysis with the goal of reducing window collisions.

 

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Acadian Flycatcher

acadian flycatcher

This Flycatcher has a pale yellow mouth lining.

Powdermill Nature Reserve’s avian research center is part of Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s biological research station in Rector, Pennsylvania.  The research center operates a bird banding station, conducts bioacoustical research, and performs flight tunnel analysis with the goal of reducing window collisions.