Dave Russell is an Associate Teaching Professor in Miami University’s Department of Biology and co-founder of the Avian Research and Education Institute. He’s also a master bird bander, which means he can work with federally protected birds and train others to become bird banders.
Episode Description
Three billion, that’s how many birds the United States and Canada have lost since 1970. That decline shows up among threatened species as well as among birds we might find in our backyards like sparrows or woodpeckers. One way scientists track the size and health of bird populations is through bird banding and that’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Dave Russell
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
3 billion. That's how many birds the US and Canada have lost since 1970. That decline shows up among threatened species as well as among birds we might find in our backyards like sparrows or woodpeckers. One way scientists track the size and health of bird populations is through bird banding. And that's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's Department of Statistics and media journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me as regular panelist John Bailer emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is Dave Russell. Russell is a senior lecturer in Miami University's Department of Biology and co founder of the Avian Research and Education Institute. He's also a master bird bander, which means he can work with federally protected birds, as well as train others to become bird banders. Dave, thank you so much for joining us today. How'd you get started with bird banding?
David Russell
I got started with bird banding because of my wife. I've been an avid birder out in the field looking at birds since I was four. But my wife doesn't see birds very well in the field. And I thought, wow, let's do something by hand. And she's a neuro endocrinologist. So she tends to look at the finer scale of things anyway. And it was something we could do together. So we started bird banding stations about 20 years ago in 2004. at Hueston Woods
John Bailer
Hueston woods. I mean, for people that are listening that don't know about it. This is kind of a little bit of a unique island, in this part of Southwest Ohio. Can you talk a little bit about kind of where that is and why that might be an important place to start a bird banding?
David Russell
Yeah. Okay, which is a fantastic place. It's basically as you're saying it's an island in the middle of a sea of agriculture. And from a bird's perspective, if you're a migrating bird, you're at 5000 feet looking for some place to stop and refuel. It's that green oasis within a green oasis. And so we get a lot of migrant species that will then stop to refuel before they head north or south depending on which direction you're going. It's also near the university. So it's relatively easy to get to the banding station. But it is also one of the directives for the state parks in addition to being for recreation, it's also for conservation. And so being able to collaborate between the university and state park systems in habitat maintenance and monitoring populations, it was a natural fit. So Hueston Woods has been a fantastic partner for the last 20 years.
Rosemary Pennington
So what exactly do you do when your bird banding?
David Russell
So one of the, as you're mentioning in the intro, bird populations have crashed in the last 50 years. Now, not all bird populations are down. So things like waterfowl, duck hunters are actually some of the most important conservationists we have. And because of wanting to have healthy duck populations, duck hunters have maintained wetlands so a lot of bird banding is actually associated with Fish and Wildlife monitoring duck populations, so they don't overharvest ducks. Now, the for non the other population actually that's up is Raptors with DDT and some of the other chlorinated hydrocarbons being off the market. They have increased in numbers, though, I will say we're having some issues with some of the neonicotinoids now but so not all populations are down. So when you say we've lost 30% of breeding birds in the US in the last couple of decades, what it really means is we've significantly lost more than that of some important groups like warblers and Cheerios and Orioles. And while some might be up, many particularly long distance, migrants are just getting killed. And so bird banding was initially started to monitor populations. But the problem with bird banding is you have to recapture them to read the band. So a band is a lightweight aluminum bracelet with a social security number on it. And so a bird is assigned a unique set Security numbers, we net them, we have about 40, giant hair nets, basically 40 feet long, 10 feet tall. And we capture the birds we put on a band and then it's like a visit to the doctor's office. So they are age, their sex there. We take a whole series of measurements, the birds then given a band weighed and off it goes. So this is it was an it was initiated. While we probably been banding birds for 100 years in the US, but it it has taken on some really, there's some important questions that it's able to tackle now. And so bird banding has kind of bifurcated. We used to catch birds and hope to catch them again, in Canada in the summer and ground so we can build that kind of activity of, you know, is this bird going to Costa Rica? Or is this bird going to Guatemala? Or is this bird going to Ontario? But so few individuals are recaptured that it's very difficult to build that connectivity. So there are some automated telemetry based systems that we've been using the last couple of years for actually following bird migration. But from the banding aspect, one of the absolutely critical elements that's necessary when we talk about bird conservation is this ability for bird ability to no survivorship, how many males how many females, how many young birds, how many birds are heading south, how many birds are heading back north, are all the adult birds dying in the wintering grounds, and we're only getting young birds. And the only way you're gonna get that information is by having the bird in hand. So this kind of bifurcation, there's an automated monitoring system now. But for bird banders, we're actually supplying that in the hand in the field of survivorship and aging and sexing for life history modeling.
Rosemary Pennington
For the species, it's kind of like a census for birds.
David Russell
It's more exact than a census, because it gives us the actual, it does give us the proportion of adults or young. But there are other methods Doppler radar will actually give you population size or, or migration size. I mean, birds are giant sex, little sacks of water. So it actually shows up on the weather radar, they'll actually use that for the size of bird movements.
John Bailer
Now I'm thinking of myself as the Giants. It's nice to have these sacks of water here talking. That's right. So thanks for that image that will never leave.
David Russell
Every time you watch the weather, you're gonna–
John Bailer
You know, one of the things that I thought was really interesting is you've talked about this, I found myself thinking, okay, you've been in this game for 20 years. And the technology has certainly changed dramatically. I mean, how fast you can take a photo of somebody who's going through in the fact that you can now start, you know, like you said that radar can even detect these. And I'm just trying to picture how in the heck does it differentiate even species as well? That's, that's remarkable.
David Russell
It can't differentiate species. But what it can differentiate is numbers. And again, you know, you watch the weather, and it goes from green to yellow. And all that, well, you can actually see migrant birds and evening coming up and green to yellow and then heading off in a direction on Doppler radar, you can go to the radar sites for that. What's necessary then, is particularly in these, they're called migrant traps, these areas where the birds when they come across, they tend to funnel into because of habitat. You'll then have boots on the ground in those spots, saying, wow, it's white throated sparrows that came in last night with a bunch of sweets and thrushes or something else. So that requires some ground truthing to kind of look at the numbers that are there.
John Bailer
So what happens with your data? I mean, so you're a pocket here. And this is replicated all over the US and over the world, I would imagine. So where does the data go? And how's it used?
David Russell
It is and this is where it's become a much more collaborative effort. And we'll hopefully talk about MODIS in a little while this automated tracking system, and what MODIS has done has brought a community both from scientific individuals to non so it covers the whole gamut of people that are interested in bird conservation. And bird banding is a very specific science or art form, and our data, all of the bands that I put on our birds in Hueston woods are assigned to me by the bird banding laboratory as a USGS department, and it used to be in Buxton, wildlife, I think they're doing some moving right now. But the bird banding lab collects all of the band data from the US and Canada. Mexico has its own banding lab, Colombia. So they're their other collect. There are other organizations that handle the branding in their countries. But the banding lab handles US and Canada.
Rosemary Pennington
Well, I'll just go ahead and ask what MODIS? Since you've mentioned…
David Russell
The reason I'm so excited about Modis is that Miami now has a modis tower. We just put it up last weekend, weekend before last. It is an automated bird tracking system. It's birds in Canada. I guess the organizer for this? And what do you do? A bird is fitted with a little nano tag, it's a harnessed little chip that gives off a unique beep I guess cheap free.
Rosemary Pennington
Oh, no, I'm doomed.
John Bailer
It's a Rosemary.
David Russell
So basically, a bird is fitted with one of these tracking units, and about ever depending on how you said it, but let's say for the sake of argument every 10 seconds, it emits a unique code that signifies this individual is flying over. And so there is an array of internal towers. There's probably 1500 Now that are spread from Chile to the Arctic Ocean. There's a heavy concentration in the eastern United States. But it's now in 35 countries and it's spreading rapidly. And but basically a bird as it's passing from point A to point B, if it crosses over an area monitored by one of these towers, and they go roughly 30 kilometers 3030 Kilometer space around them, then it's just like when you go to Kroger's and you run your interviews over, you know, 278, craft orange juice. And so this will say it's been number 683. It's just passed over at this height and going to speed and, and so you can now where what we hoped to gain from banding was this connectivity. What we're gaining from Modus now is you can follow birds literally from Ecuador, across the Gulf, when it hits the Gulf Coast, you can then follow it across Ohio, crossing the Great Lakes up to Hudson Bay. And so you can actually follow a bird from where it started to where it winds up. And what it allows you to do is actually determine do they stop? Or do they not stop? If they stop? Where do they stop? Is there a collection of birds that typically all go to the same area. So from a conservation dollar perspective, now you can spit rather than spending money uniformly across the landscape, you can say this area is of critical concern for migrating birds, this area of critical concern. And we also are getting an understanding. We had assumed that birds stop, let's say every two to 300 kilometers on their way north, it might take two and a half weeks. What we're finding is that like many species, it's a time sensitive migration, they hit the Gulf Coast, and then they don't stop till they hit Canada. And so this has direct implications from a conservation perspective, they have to have a strong refueling site in the Gulf Coast. If they've just crossed the Gulf of Mexico, they've got to be able to refuel, refuel quickly, and then be able to do the next jump. As opposed to having eight stops. As you're going north and we're in, this is the sort of data that Modis is now beginning to generate. And it's causing us to re-evaluate many of our suppositions about what we thought migrating birds did.
Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to Stats and Stories and today we're talking about birds and bird banding with Dave Russell.
John Bailer
So I find myself having lots of questions that sort of emerge as you're talking about the same one. One question is when you think about this new system that's in play, I mean, does that start to remove kind of your need to do banding? I mean, I started thinking about you know, do you just maybe need to do the banding at the the terminus of these trips?
David Russell
No in that you still need to be able to to monitor all stages in life history, so we still need to know survivorship, we still need to know, are there age and sex differences between that survivorship and that's you can actually Motus adds to that or banding ads to motorists because now we can actually follow a male and maybe males have a different migration pattern than females. And maybe young birds have a different migration pattern. And it also when we look at dispersal, that might be that a particular species say of thrush, we have with thrushes that are one of those dramatically declining species of which Hueston Woods is one of the core breeding areas with thrushes. For a couple of years at the banding station, we got two individuals that we caught on the same day, three years consecutively in the same net. But we never caught them any other time. So they had passed through. And so these birds, once they kind of figure out their migration routine, frequently do the same thing year after year after year until they die. We are finding that there are a number of species that don't. And so if we assumed that everybody acted the same, and we're now finding that it might be that females actually disperse, and males go back to that or young males go back to where they hatched, or females come back. This has all sorts of conservation implications. And if we just assumed everybody returned to where they hatched, you begin to look at problems such as population genetics and things like that. So we're learning. We're learning a ton. The concerning part is we're learning a ton at a time and bird populations are declining so dramatically. We're almost not learning it fast enough. And so that's one of the sobering parts of all this is there's so much really cool stuff we're finding, but it's almost out of it's at a critical time, rather than at a time where we had a lot of time to respond to the new information.
Rosemary Pennington
You said you've been doing this for 20 years. And I know there's data that shows a decline in bird populations as a whole. But what are some things that you've noticed here locally in Hueston woods, over the 20 years that you've been doing this that sort of stand out to you?
David Russell
One of the things that I teach ornithology, and I absolutely love taking Navas burgers out in the field and kind of introducing them to this. I grew up in Cincinnati, and I've been burning since I was probably four years old. But as a young birder in Cincinnati, the URL first week, first 10 days of May, are when many of our new tropical art long distance migrants are arriving back from Central American South America. And I used to go out, and to areas like Hueston woods or Spring Grove cemetery, and I would be overwhelmed by the size of just the number of birds that would be passing through. Now, some of it might be the memory of a nine year old going to their slot. But what I'm finding now is I keep telling my students, oh, I can't wait until the first week of May, we'll get out, we'll hit areas like Sugar Shack or group campgrounds at Hueston woods, and I can't wait to see the waves of birds come over. And every year, I think I wonder if I missed that wave. I haven't. I see there are certainly birds there, I can get over 100 species in Hueston woods in a day, but I work hard. And it's ones and twos and fives and 10s. And there might be yellow warblers in big numbers, but all of the others are just kind of scattered among them. So what I've been feeling in the last 5-10 years is this kind of disappointment, where maybe I missed it, you know, maybe the peak came through and I wasn't available, or it was before a storm. And so I think that's what I've been feeling most frequently, is I'm working harder to find what used to be easy.
John Bailer
You know, and maybe that's the, it would be the best of all stories if you were just missing it. Right. One thing I found that as you were talking about this, I was thinking about your comments about refueling and also the comments on the lead about, you know, the decline of population. So, so Can Can you, you know, reflect a little bit about how these are, are kind of connected or and what else might be some of the drivers of the decline of species.
David Russell
The other hat I wear, mostly because I have no hair so I wear lots of hats. But on the other hand , I'm going into March next year. I'm a trained entomologist, that's where my degrees are. And insect populations, there was a big paper that came out that basically, it came out on my birthday, actually, five, six years ago. But the paper showed over 27 years of data and 60, or 70 sites in Europe, where they use the same trap and the same area and the same method every year for 27 years, that there was at least a 76% decline in total insect biomass flying insect biomass. But in summer times that was closer to 82% loss. And this gave a number to what we've been seeing in that, you know, I have my students, you know, many of them live up, they go there live in Cleveland, or they live up in a cell, right, you know, you drive up to Cleveland to drive back, I said, there's nothing more annoying than pulling off at a gas station, and finding the reservoir for the windshield washer, empty, you know, it's just, it's one of my pet peeves, except they have no idea what I'm talking about, because they never use the windshield washer. Because you don't have books over your windshield. And you can go all the way to Cleveland and come back and never have to wash your windshield. So from an anecdotal perspective, you're going well, maybe I just missed them. But now, there is data. And there have been subsequent papers out that have shown this decline. And in the end, the birds that we are losing in large numbers are warblers, for instance, or Caterpillar feeders, in migration. And so we've got all of these birds that are feeding on insects, that now we don't have the insect populations. So maybe it doesn't matter what we do. From a habitat perspective. Maybe our efforts should be on insect conservation. So they have food, when they get to the rest stop. Rather than worrying about how much breeding ground they have. I mean, it's not logical for you, you do have to have breeding space for breeding. But where we're finding we've been doing actually an insect study also with Hueston woods for the last several years. And the students have been weighing biomass and using the same protocols they used for the study. And I have a trap that is called a malaise. And a malaise is basically a tent with open sides and a senator baffle. So flying insects fly in and they get caught in an alcohol jar at the top. I can, I used to be able, when I came back in the 80s, I came back during the summer, when I was in college, I'd come back and spend some summers back here. And I was an entomology major. So I loved collecting back in, in Cincinnati because I had mostly California and six at the time. And I used to put a malaise trap up at my folks place out in Clermont County, and I would have to empty a quart jar every day, out of the malaise. And so when I go look at the samples now from Hueston woods, an area that is a protected area that should have the highest diversity and the highest, I can actually count individually, the number of insects in the bottom of the jar after a week in a malaise trap. And so it's really struck home, just what I've seen on my windshield are not seeing on my windshield, I'm also not seeing in my jars, in areas that are protected. So that directly then feeds back, so to speak on, on the birds that are relying on them.
John Bailer
So, you know, one of the things that I always like to do is to try to find some hope, you know, and sort of, in part of finding hope is finding ways to act. So as you think about, you know, there's, there's, you've described some of the data ranging from insect biomass to, to these Bird Counts, certain species, particularly at high risk and some of their inputs that are required. Are there things that that people can do to react and respond and help support maybe a recovery?
David Russell
Yep, I'm a half full kind of glass, half full glass kind of guy myself here and, and that's maybe one of the bright spots in this is a we are finding new data, we are finding new things we are we might be able to emphasize some of our conservation dollars in more in smaller, more concentrated areas. But one of the biggest things that we can do and I think being part of a university is kind of the answer to some of that is awareness and, and not just awareness of people that are 60 7080 But we've got to get kids on board, we've got to get, we've got to get the younger generations. So they appreciate being outside, so they care that there are wildflowers in there things like that. So yes, we've got to, we've got to get them off their phones and off. Not binge watching Witcher.
John Bailer
But so there's more than that there's more than just awareness. There's I mean, I'm thinking about the action that Rosemary and I might do in our yard, right?
David Russell
No, and I think the other side of this coin is we, we have to change our perception of what beauty is, in some fashion. When you drive through suburbia, a beautiful lawn is one that has had a ton of chemicals put on it, it's weed free. The flowers are all non-native. And when we look at this from a bird or an insect perspective, it's a wasteland. It's a desert. So what we can do from it and just look at Oxford from Google Earth, it is a giant green patch. But if that green patch were actually planted in native flowers, native bushes, native trees, or even a section of each yard had that in it, you could dramatically increase the overall amount of natural habitat that supplies the right caterpillars that supplies the right flowers that supplies the right fruits for the native species that are here. And that's something that everybody can do. And it will have a tremendous impact. In addition to that, you have to think critically about things like we certainly need mosquito control periodically for Disease Control. But we don't need to routinely hose our yards down with insecticides to kill mosquitoes or anything else for that matter. If we evaluate how much lawn suddenly has five acre lawns out there, what happens if we had a one acre lawn around the house and four acres of native habitat that is perceived to be beautiful, not overgrown, or something along those lines? So I think part of it is changing our perception of beauty. And the other part of it is augmenting what is out there with native plants in particular, in your lawn and garden. And that will make all of these birds fly over us. So it's not like Oh, it's not like we're trying to attract them here. They're flying over us. So with their resources here, they're gonna stop.
Rosemary Pennington
That's all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Dave, thank you so much for being here.
Dave Russell My pleasure. Thank you.
Rosemary Pennington Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University's departments of statistics and media, journalism and film and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter @StatsandStories, Apple podcast, or other places where you find podcasts. If you'd like to share your thoughts on the program, send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.