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Hi everyone, welcome back to Curious By Nature.
My name is Marjorie and today we're going to be talking about birds, migration, and more.
We're also going to be joined by a special guest,
Geoff Williamson from the Chicago Ornithological Society.
He'll be telling us about bird migration, how climate change impacts birds,
and some of the common birds you can expect to see around North Pond.
Before we get started, if you like learning about nature, science, and local wildlife
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If you're ready, we're ready. Let's get started.
Hi everyone, so I'm here with Geoff from the Chicago Ornithological Society.
Geoff, can you tell us a little bit about what the Chicago Ornithological Society does? Yeah sure,
the Chicago Ornithological Society, or COS as we generally refer to it as, it's a birding club.
People get together and go out into the natural areas around the city
and look for birds, share stories about birds.
It offers also a variety of different programs, online these days.
And the organization has been around since 1912.
It's one of the oldest birding-oriented organizations in the Chicago area.
Wow, that's really cool.
(Marjorie) Why are we seeing so many birds around the museum at this time of year?
(Geoff) Well, right now we're in the middle of fall migration,
and the reason that they're doing this is that their food supplies up north have gone away. A
lot of the birds that we see this time of year around the pond are passing through,
the migrating birds that are passing through, they're insect eaters and as the weather gets
colder the insects become dormant and go away, and the birds that feed on those have to move south.
And these days with with a lot of climate change going on sometimes the birds that are moving
depending on the length of the day are having a little bit more difficulty making a living.
So birds that are coming north in the spring to eat insects, sometimes those
insects are coming out earlier in the season now because the world is a little bit warmer.
And so the birds that are moving, the timing of their migration may not be in sync with the
emergence of the insects, and they miss out on a food source that can fuel their flight north.
So climate change is a major concern for those of us who care about birds and we worry that the bird
populations aren't going to make the adjustments necessary to survive as the climate changes.
(Marjorie) If someone were to come do their own bird walk around North Pond,
what are some of the common birds that they would see?
(Geoff) Well, they'd definitely see Canada geese.
You can always find Canada geese around the pond and also mallard ducks.
Other birds that we see here regularly,
the American crows, downy woodpeckers, the little black-capped chickadee is a common bird,
and a variety of different kinds of sparrows of one sort or another are generally around here.
And one of the birds that I like to see that's always here,
sometimes we see it sometimes we don't, is the peregrine falcon.
They perch up on top of the really tall apartment
buildings that surround the pond and hunt from there.
(Marjorie) So it's early morning while we're out here right now.
Is there a best time of day to go birding and look for birds?
(Geoff) Yeah, this time, the start of the day, is the best time to go look for the birds.
The reason is that as the day starts and the sun rises, that's when the birds are the most active,
and when they're the most active they're the easiest for us to see.
It's still possible to go out bird watching at almost any
point during the day, but the time when you're going to see the most birds and
the most variety of birds will be right in the first few hours after sunrise. Almost
any of the lakefront parks is a really good place for bird watching.
This is especially true during the migratory seasons.
Surprisingly a lot of birds migrate at night
and so you'll get essentially clouds of birds
that are flying by during the night and when the sun comes up
those birds that find themselves out over Lake Michigan can't come to to rest there on the lake,
so they fly into the closest point of land and right along the lakefront.
And the parks, of course, have a lot of the habitat that the birds can use, trees and shrubs
and more natural areas. So that's certainly where I go to do a lot of my bird watching.
(Marjorie) Once you see a bird, are there some easy ways that you can
identify it and tell what bird you're looking at?
(Geoff) Yeah there are a lot of resources for people that want to learn about birds and how
to tell the different birds apart. These days with smartphones and mobile devices, there are
a lot of apps for helping out with this. A good one for someone starting out is called Merlin.
The Merlin app has a variety of features.
It asks you a couple of basic questions about the bird
and can even facilitate identification from a photograph if you have that.
This is put out by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology which also
promotes the eBird app which is a good tool for record keeping and helps you
understand what kinds of birds are around at the particular time of year that you're looking.
I think it's always a good idea to have a field guide, a printed book.
It's a little easier to
browse through that and start to get familiar with what kinds of birds are there,
and there are a variety of different good field guides that are available today.
(Marjorie) So, we were talking about bird migration,
is there some things that we can do at home to help keep the migrating birds safe?
(Geoff) You know, the migratory journey for birds is filled with a lot of peril.
It's, as you imagine, it's a pretty hard journey for the birds to make and
two of the dangers that they face
are associated with us as people.
These are outdoor cats and buildings.
A lot of birds don't make the journey safely because they run into a cat that's outdoors,
so if you have a cat, please keep that cat an indoor cat and that will help preserve bird life.
And then many birds end up dying because they fly into buildings and much of that is they see
trees and shrubs reflected in the glass of windows
and they think they're flying to safety
when they fly into the glass itself.
So keeping birdfeeders away from windows is a good idea in general.
You can break up the reflective pattern on the window with stickers or decals.
(Marjorie) Thanks for sharing this information today with us, and for taking us out on
a bird walk today. (Geoff) You're very welcome, Marjorie, it's been my pleasure.
That's our show for today. I hope you enjoyed learning about bird migration.
Special thanks to Geoff for spending some time with us today.
If you have any questions for us or for Geoff be sure to drop them in the comments below,
and be sure to hit the notification bell so you never miss a video.
If you want to learn more about migration and birds, we've picked out some videos for you here.
We'll see you back here next time on Curious By Nature.