Wonders of Bird Migrations

Wonders of Bird Migrations, City Lights, and How We Can Help

Written by Sayna Parsi

When it comes to epic journeys, migratory birds are the ultimate world-travelers. Forget road trips and cross-country flights—these feathered friends are all about globe-trotting, and they do it without Google Maps! Every year, millions of birds embark on mind-blowing migrations, traveling thousands of miles to reach their seasonal homes. But as amazing as their journeys are, modern-day obstacles like light pollution are throwing a wrench in the works. Let’s dive into some fascinating facts about bird migration, the impact of city lights on our avian travelers, and what we can all do to help them on their way.

Why Do Birds Migrate?

Migration is more than just a long-distance road trip; it’s a survival strategy. Birds migrate to find food, breed, and escape harsh climates. As seasons change, they move to regions where food is plentiful, the climate is favorable, and breeding conditions are ideal. This incredible journey ensures they have everything they need to thrive, whether it's food, a safe place to raise their young, or a milder winter.

Mind-Blowing Migration Facts: Birds on the Move!

• Record-Breaking Flyers: The bar-tailed godwit holds the world record for the longest nonstop migration. This superstar flies from Alaska to New Zealand—a whopping 7,000 miles—without taking a single break for food, water, or rest. They even sleep during their flight. If only they had phones, they’d definitely top the leaderboards on Strava!

• Super Navigators: Birds use a combination of the sun, stars, Earth’s magnetic field, and even smell to find their way during migration. It’s like they have built-in GPS, but way cooler.

• High-Flyers: Some birds, like the bar-headed goose, are extreme altitude enthusiasts. They fly over the Himalayas at heights of up to 29,000 feet—higher than Mount Everest!

• Unexpected Migrants: Think migration is only for exotic birds? Think again! Some of our backyard regulars are seasoned travelers too. The American Robin, often associated with the start of spring, actually migrates. While some stay put if they find enough food, many robins head south for the winter, traveling in large flocks. Another surprise? The tiny Ruby-throated Hummingbird. These little dynamos might be a common sight at your summer feeders, but come fall, they make a solo journey to Central America, flying non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico!

Lights Out, Wings Up: How Light Pollution Affects Migration

Birds have a remarkable sense of direction, but bright city lights can confuse even the most seasoned travelers. Light pollution is a big deal for migrating birds, and here’s why:

• Disorientation: Birds often navigate by the moon and stars. Bright artificial lights from cities can disorient them, causing them to circle endlessly, exhaust themselves, or even crash into buildings.

• Timing is Everything: Light pollution can also mess with a bird’s internal clock, leading them to migrate too early or too late, missing crucial windows for food and rest.

• Dangerous Pit Stops: Confused by city lights, birds might land in urban areas where food and safe resting spots are scarce. This can lead to increased stress and lower survival rates.

Bright Ideas: How Cities Are Helping Birds Navigate

Cities around the world are waking up to the fact that light pollution is a serious problem for migratory birds. Here are some brilliant (but not too bright!) solutions:

• Lights Out Campaigns: Cities like Chicago, New York, and Phoenix have embraced “Lights Out” programs, encouraging businesses and residents to dim or turn off unnecessary lights during peak migration seasons. Not only does this save energy, but it also gives birds a clearer path to follow—and as a bonus, it makes it possible to see stars that otherwise would be invisible due to light pollution.

• Bird-Friendly Building Designs: Some cities are getting creative with architecture. Buildings with bird-friendly glass, bird-tape on windows, or using shades and curtains help minimize the risk of collisions. In fact, cities like San Francisco have guidelines for bird-safe building design.

• Sky Glow Awareness: Raising awareness about “sky glow”—the brightening of the night sky by artificial light—has prompted communities to reduce unnecessary lighting. This means more stars for us to gaze at and safer journeys for our feathered friends!

How You Can Help: Become a Bird Migration Ally

You don’t need to be an architect or city planner to help birds on their migration journeys. Here’s how you can pitch in:

• Dim Indoor Lights: Use curtains or blinds to keep indoor light from spilling outside, especially during migration seasons (spring and fall). If you work, you can also connect with your office building's facilities department to ensure that your office uses timer-based lights that turn off at night.

• Reduce Outdoor Lights: Use motion sensors so lights only activate when needed, add light caps to direct light toward the ground, and dim lights wherever possible.

• Spread the Word: The more people know about the impact of light pollution, the better. Share this post, talk to your HOA, neighbors, and facilities team at work, and support local initiatives to reduce light pollution.

Bird migrations are one of nature’s most incredible spectacles, and by making a few simple changes, we can help ensure these journeys remain safe and successful for generations to come. So let’s flip the switch, plant some greenery, and be the wingmen (and women | people) our feathered friends need!

Pin Contest Winner

Pin Contest Winner

Thank you to everyone who submitted their design for the first Eastside Audubon lapel pin contest! We received quite a few submissions, and with an overwhelming vote of 52%, Annika Mohr’s design was selected as the winner for her design of a Great Blue Heron.

My name is Annika Mohr and I’m an incoming high school senior. I like to work both digitally and traditionally. I plan to study art in college and have a career in it too. I enjoy incorporating nature, especially birds, into my art. 

In my pin design, I chose to draw a great blue heron. I first collected multiple references of great blue herons and with my ipad sketched out different poses. After finding my favorite, I tested out different colors and blended them with cross-hatching to add a feathery texture.

What started off as just a random exploration in my city, lead to my inspiration. Across a hidden creek, I saw a great blue heron for the first time. I only got to look at it for a couple seconds before it flew away. Seeing it fly really made me realize how majestic it was. It wasn’t only a huge bird I didn’t recognize, it also surprised me finding it in a random small creek surrounded by highways. It’s stayed on my mind ever since. 

I really love birds, they are all around. Getting to witness all the different shapes, sizes, and colors is something I’m grateful for. When paying attention to birds, it’s like being absorbed into another world. You start to hear all the different chirps and movements that you wouldn’t pay attention to otherwise.

Winning design for the 2024 Eastside Audubon Enamel Pin Contest, by Annika Mohr.

We hope to host this contest again next year, and looking forward to seeing future designs!

Attending the Cornell Young Birders Event

Attending the Cornell Young Birders Event

Written by Song Han Ngo

As a high schooler with a passion for birdwatching, attending the Cornell Young Birders Event was an amazing experience that I’ll never forget. The event, which occurs annually, brings together 16 young birders from across the world to spend the weekend learning about career options in ornithology and birding in Ithaca, New York.

Sapsucker Woods and the Cornell Lab.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is located within the Sapsucker woods, a natural area that contains a variety of habitats ranging from open ponds to evergreen forests. Additionally, the nearby Montezuma National Wildlife refuge offered extensive marshlands and open water, further providing opportunities to see a diverse range of birds. This made each birding trip a unique and exciting excursion, with the young birders spotting 131 species over the event, including some delights such as the Least Bittern and Virginia Rail!

Aside from the birding, the event also focused on meeting and learning from the experiences of the different staff members at the Cornell lab. On the opening night of the event, we were introduced to the unique idea of “Birds and”, which means that birders should seek to bring other non-ornithology related skills and tie it together with the birding world in order to make an impact. Over the next few days, we had the opportunity to meet a variety of people working at the lab, from the developers behind Merlin to field researchers studying penguins in the Southern hemisphere. Whether it be spreading awareness through the community, coding an innovative identification algorithm, or lobbying for the passage of new laws, we were stressed the importance of interdisciplinary skills and encouraged to find out what we want our own “Birds and” to be. 

Sound recording at Shindagin Hollow.

Finally, we were able to experience hands-on learning through different labs guided by Cornell staff. On Saturday morning, we were able to make contributions to the Macaulay library’s audio collection, recording the vibrant songs of little birds such as thrushes and wrens in the nearby Shindagin Hollow. Later that evening, we were taught the processes for editing and annotating the recordings to make them useful for training Merlin’s sound ID feature. We were also given tours of many of the Cornell lab’s facilities, my favorite being the night at the museum, where we were allowed to view and even touch many of the taxidermied specimens of birds that Cornell keeps. The museum has over 50,000 specimens collected since the early 1900s, even including some extinct species such as the Ivory Billed Woodpecker and Passenger pigeon!

Taxidermy being prepared at the museum tour.

Overall, the Cornell Young Birders Event was an incredible opportunity that deepened my passion for birds. It was incredibly inspiring to meet not only the talented and driven Cornell staff but also the other young birders, who shared my enthusiasm for ornithology. Before the event, I had never realized that there were so many other teenagers out there just like me who loved birds just as much as me, and I’m looking forward to keeping in touch and staying friends with them through the years. On top of that, I left the event with a new outlook on what it means to have a career in ornithology. As someone with a strong quantitative background especially in coding and math, I never realized that these skills are relevant and useful to the birding world. I hope that in the future, I’ll be able to help conserve birds using them. I am grateful for what the event has taught me, and look forward to pursuing ornithology in the future.

Birdathon 2024 Recap

Birdathon 2024 Recap

Thanks to everyone who made the 2024 Birdathon a complete success!  With your support, we have surpassed our goal making this year’s Birdathon one of the best Eastside Audubon has ever had!

If you are new to Eastside Audubon or Birdathon, let me give you some context.  Every May, many Audubon chapters run a month-long fundraising campaign called Birdathon.  This can be a complex campaign as every chapter will do it differently and the campaign may be different year to year even within the same chapter.  Our 2024 Birdathon focuses on Team Big Days, Birding Field Trips, Birds and Brews, Global Big Day, and accepting general donations.  As you can imagine, this is a crucial part in funding Eastside Audubon in the next year.

As of writing this note, we have raised about $13,900 for Birdathon!  This does not include our generous match of up to $15,000 from our friends at the Melody S. Robiduox Foundation!  We usually get Birdathon donations for up to a couple of months after the end of May so I fully expect our final number to be even higher.  Thank you all for your support of Eastside Audubon!

I want to take minute to report on our Big Day Teams.  A Big Day is when a team of birders goes out on a day to count as many bird species as they can and raise money from their supporters to push the team to counting more birds and staying out longer.  This year, we had 4 teams.

• Team Bird Brains, captained by past Eastside Audubon President Jim Rettig, started their day in Bothell before making their way to Marymoor Park, the Sammamish Plateau and ultimately to central Washington.  Their day ended with an impressive 90 species seen!  Though impressive, this exact same route in 2011 saw 125 species.  The team noted their concern about continued human development, drought, and effects of wildfire that have worsened since their doing this route 13 years ago.

• Team Newport Nightingales, captained by Perci Olcer and Betsy Swann, is our team from the Birding Club at Newport High School.  Their outing was to the Montlake Fill where they counted 37 species!  A highlight for them was seeing a soaring Green Heron clutching a worm in its beak.  Both Hattie Cifti and Mckenzie Brown are looking forward to doing this again next year!

• Team Karismatic Kestrels, captained by past Eastside Audubon President Andy McCormick, started at Marymoor Park and traveled east on I90, crossing over the Columbia River.  They counted exactly 100 birds with the 100th being a Great Horned Owl perched on a telephone pole as they were starting to make their way back home!

• Finally, Team Pelican Dive Bar, captained by current Eastside Audubon President Jeremy Lucas (me), stayed on its normal route of going out to the coast of southwest Washington to focus on shore and sea birds.  We saw 63 species including, to our surprise, Fork-tailed Storm-petrels in the Westport Marina!  To view our trip report, click here. 

I would also like to give a huge shoutout to everyone that helped lead events for Birdathon.  First, we had 6 field trips led by Chuck Guilford, Kathy Kuyper,  Kendall Wiggins, Andy McCormick, Etta Cosey, and Stan Wood.  Thank you to each of those leaders who ensured that our participants “got on the birds”!  I would also like to thank our Birding Chair Amanda Buse for helping with the organization of some of these walks.  Thank you to John Spilker for helping on our Global Big Day organization.  Global Big Day (very different from the Team Big Day) is still a new and small part of Birdathon and I appreciate John’s efforts in helping drive it for 2024.  Thank you to Amanda Leon, the Executive Director of Eastside Audubon who works tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure everything is smooth on game day.  Finally, again, I would like to thank all of YOU for your support of Eastside Audubon and helping us make May 2024 one to remember!

If you are interested in leading any event for Birdathon 2025, or have some interesting ideas, we want to hear from you.  Email me at president@eastsideaudubon.org

With gratitude,
Jeremy Lucas
Board President

Puget Sound Seabird Survey

Puget Sound Seabird Survey - Calling All Birders!

Volunteers conducting surveys © Toby Ross

The Puget Sound Seabird Survey is looking for birders to join this established Community Science program!

Now in its 16th season, you’ll be contributing to valuable science that monitors wintering seabirds across Puget Sound and informs important management decisions. Volunteers are asked to conduct 7 surveys with a small team of fellow surveyors at specific coastal locations. All surveys are synchronized to take place once per month on the first Saturday, October – April. You will be provided training in the survey technique, and ideally will have good seabird identification skills. However, there are roles on the survey team for birders of all levels. This year we started working with the University of Washington on a major research study focusing on seabird distribution and population trends. We’re also planning to collaborate with Birds Canada on a project that will examine the status of seabirds across the entire Salish Sea ecosystem. More information on PSSS can be found on the Puget Sound Bird Observatory website along with a fun Seabird ID quiz. If you’re interested in taking part, please complete this application form or reach out to Program Manager Toby Ross t_ross@pugetsoundbirds.org

Links contained in text:

PSBO Website – https://www.pugetsoundbirds.org/about-psss

Seabird ID quiz - https://forms.gle/4qZZNMvfVmE4yfh68

PSSS Application Form - https://form.jotform.com/241365687010151

Image credit:

Northern Shoveler © Ellen & Tony (no surname provided)

Volunteers conducting survey © Toby Ross