Yesterday morning I came downstairs to the kitchen and, before breakfast, I checked the laptop computer I had left running on my kitchen table. The computer was hooked up to a microphone I had built that was positioned on my porch aimed up at the sky. From the time I had gone to bed at 11:00, the microphone and computer had detected dozens of small songbirds migrating south. Most sounded like Yellow-rumped Warblers with a few White-throated Sparrows mixed in.
Click here to hear one of their nocturnal flight calls recorded that night
Later that morning I left for a 450-mile road trip across New Hampshire and Vermont, past Montreal and through southern Ontario to Ottawa. By that evening I was with a group of 40 amazing people at Econiche�a cozy retreat center nestled in the fall yellow and reds just north of Ottawa. These were people working at the front lines of boreal forest conservation in places with names like Lake Winnepeg, Peel River, Nahanni, Mackenzie Valley, Alberta Oil Sands, Lac Joe. These are the people working to make sure that I can still go out and hear Yellow-rumped Warblers and White-throated Sparrows passing over my house on an October evening. That there are Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers to see in Central Park, Dark-eyed Juncos at feeders in Chicago, Lesser Scaup in Texas, and even an abundance of Mallards in Arkansas.
The birds to see here have been a little skimpy�a few Black-capped Chickadees, a Ruffed Grouse, some Golden-crowned Kinglets in a short late afternoon walk. Later listening in the evening with an intrepid crew from Manitoba, Quebec, and Northwest Territories yielded the sounds of a Yellow-rumped Warbler, a Hermit Thrush, a flock of Canada Geese and, a surprise to me, an American Wigeon.
The birds may be skimpy but the passion and skills of the people actively trying to protect them is not. It is good to know that Nic is pushing the Quebec government to increase the percent of protected acreage from 3% to 8% in the next few years, that Anna is working with First Nations groups in northern Ontario who want to include more conservation in their land use plans, that Alyson and Daryl are finding ways to support the model Deh Cho land use plan in the Northwest Territories that would set aside 80% of their 216,000 square kilometers as conservation lands. There�s a lot of birds in 216,000 square kilometers!
