The Prairie Owl Palouse Audubon Society

PALOUSE AUDUBON

President: Terry Gray, (208) 882-1585, clgtlg@moscow.com

Vice-President: Sarah de la Rue, sarah.delarue@vandals.uidaho.edu

Secretary: Diana Jones, joneses01@myway.com

Treasurer: Henry Willmes (208) 882-2649, hwillmes@verizon.net

Board Members: Laura Bloomfield, laurabloomfield22@yahoo.com, (206) 388-7938; and Donal Wilkinson

Conservation: VACANT

Education: Donal Wilkinson, (208) 310-3010, donalwilkinson@yahoo

Field Trips: Terry Gray, (208) 882-1585, clgtlg@moscow.com

Membership: James Storms, (509) 635-1272, nbutte@pullman.com

Newsletter/Program/Website: Tom Weber, tweber@wsu.edu, (509) 334-3817

Publicity: Diane Weber, (509) 334-3817, catbirdz@roadrunner.com

FROM THE PREZ The Christmas Bird

Counts are 3 months away. The Moscow-Pullman count will be conducted on Decem-ber 20 and the Clarkston-Lewiston count on January 3, 2009. Please think about participating in one or both of these counts. Participa-tion has been a fun day for me and others. The data gathered has become one of

the most valuable tools for bird conservation in North America. More informa-tion about the Christmas Bird Counts will be pub-lished in our next newslet-ter.

Mann Lake field trips are every Saturday morn-ing at 8:30am at the boat ramp. Currently a total of 45 people have attended one or more of these morn-ing trips. We have seen

about 50 bird species each week for a total of 108 spe-cies. As winter birds start entering our area we still have the potential of seeing at least 20 more species that we have not seen since these trips started on Au-gust 2th. Please join us on Saturdays through the end of October for fun and good birding at Mann Lake.

Terry Gray President

Volume 37 Issue 2

EVENT CALENDAR

OCTOBER

4, 11, 18 and 25—Field Trip; Mann Lake

7—Board Meeting, 7:30pm, 1912 Center, Moscow

15—Program; Roadless areas in the Clearwa-ter Drainage

NOVEMBER

4—Board Meeting, 7:30pm, 1912 Center, Moscow

12—Program; Birds of the Inland Northwest

DECEMBER

2—Board Meeting, 7:30pm, 1912 Center, Moscow

The Bewick’s Wren is a small gray and brown song-bird (5 inches) with a mod-erately long tail often held cocked over the back; a thin pointed bill with a long white stripe over the eye; middle tail feathers brown and barred with black—others black with brown barred edges and tipped with whitish gray spots; the outermost tail feathers are barred black and white—often wags tail from side to side; upperparts brown; throat white and under-parts light gray.

The Bewick’s Wren has been a welcome edition to our Pullman neighborhood. During the past weekend its presence has been noted by a rich and beautiful reper-toire of song. Even more welcome is that the wren is a year around resident.

Until about five years ago, sightings of the Be-wick’s Wren during Christ-mas Bird Counts required

documentation. Today the wren is relatively common in brushy riparian habitat throughout eastern Wash-ington.

A bird at home near hu-man buildings and gar-

dens, the Bewick's Wren was formerly common across the Midwest and eastern mountains. East-ern populations dropped drastically starting early in the 20th century, and now it is nearly restricted to the West. The severe

declines in the eastern United States coincided with range expansion in the House Wren. It is sus-pected that the House Wren, which frequently removes eggs from nests in cavities, was directly re-sponsible for the decline.

The increased availability of nest boxes may have helped the spread of the House Wren and therefore the decline of the Bewick's Wren.

In the west, until re-cently, the spe-

Bewick’s Wren October-November 2008

(see page 3)

Treasurer’s Report— 9/28/08 Checking Balance 6/30/08 $8,097.32 Norcross Grant ($77.80) Checking Balance 9/28/08 $8,019.52 Certificate of Deposit $5,129.71 Liabilities (Grants) ($4,471.74) Total Assets: $8,677.49

Membership Report—9/28/08 National & Palouse Audubon 225 Palouse Audubon (only) 47 National Audubon (only) 119 Total Membership 391 PAS Membership Year—Sep 1 to Aug 31

November 12—Birds of the Inland Northwest and Northern Rockies; Mike Denny, Birder Extraordinaire, College Place. Mike Denny, Harry Nehls, and Dave Trochlell have au-thored a new bird guide for Eastern Washington, Idaho and other parts of the Inland Northwest. Birds of the

Inland Northwest and Northern Rock-ies was just released and Mike will be here to discuss the new book, He will also have books for purchase and will be happy to autograph your copy. See related book information on page 3.

October 15—Roadless areas in the Clearwater River Drainage; Friends of the Clearwater.

Weitas Valley

In Alaska this summer, tundra swans have been marked with neck bands. As in previous years, birds were banded in 5 different regions of the state. In the next few weeks I will send out a flyer that gives the codes used in each area of the state, in the hope that it will help you learn more about the birds that you ob-serve, and also encourage you to get out and read collars.

We have also implanted 50 tundra swans with satellite transmitters (PTT's) - 10 in each of the 5 areas. If you have Google Earth on your com-

Programs

PAGE 2 VOLUME 37 ISSUE 2

puter, a link gives the current loca-tions of the PTT-marked birds. All you have to do is enter the link 'daily_tusw08_19Sep2008.kmz' in your browser and Google Earth will open it up. If you do not have a cur-rent version of Google Earth, I recom-mend down-loading it off of their web-site, as it is free and has some new features that assist with tracking the birds.

The Alaska Science Center website (http://alaska.usgs.gov/) will soon have a page dedicated to the movement of the PTT-marked swans as well as up-

Migration of Alaska-marked tundra swans dated maps of their locations. Some of the swans marked on the North Slope are beginning to migrate al-ready. Happy viewing.

Craig R. Ely Alaska Science Center 4210 University Drive Anchorage, AK 99508 (907) 786-7182

Field Trips MANN LAKE—October 4, 11, 18 and 25— These birding trips every Octo-ber Saturday morning are sponsored by Palouse Audubon and Canyon Birders, and will focus on the fall mi-gration of waterfowl and shorebirds through our region. Field trip leaders will be there from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30

a.m. This is a great time of year to observe migrants at the lake. Partici-pants are to meet at the Mann Lake boat ramp at 8:30am. To get to Mann Lake: From the north end of Lewiston, follow US 12 south into town, stay left at the first light and cross the Clearwater River on Memorial

Bridge. The left lane directs you up 21st Street at the next light. Follow it up the hill, through the Lewiston Orchards until it turns into a 2-lane road. Turn left on Powers Avenue and follow it all the way to the grain towers and the boat launch

MEMBERSHIP

Palouse Audubon Society, PO Box 3606 University Station, Moscow ID 83844, is a chapter of the National Audubon Society.

Our mission is to conserve and restore natural ecosystems, focusing on birds,

other wildlife, and their habitats for the benefit of humanity and the earth’s bio-

logical diversity.

General membership meetings are held at the 1912 Building, 3rd and Adams St, Moscow ID, at 7:30 p.m. on the third

Wednesday of each month, September through May. The board of directors meet at the 1912 Center at 7:30 p.m. on the first

Tuesday of each month.

The Prairie Owl is published every other month, August through April. Material for the Owl should be sent to the editor, Tom

Weber, 230 SE South St, Pullman WA 99163, or email tweber@wsu.edu by the

20th of the month. Subscription problems should be addressed to the membership

chair, James Storms, PO Box 235, Garfield WA 99130, (509) 635-1272 or email

nbutte@pullman.com. Visit the Palouse Audubon Society website at

http://www.palouseaudubon.org/

PAGE 3 THE PRAIRIE OWL VOLUME 37 ISSUE 2

Palouse Audubon Society estab-lished membership dues to provide a local chapter membership option. Your membership in the local chap-ter will help us maintain a high standard of service to the re-gion. We feel that our efforts at the "grass-roots" level do much to broaden the appreciation of nature, birds, and wildlife in our re-gion. Your membership will provide support for local classrooms, for lo-cal birding recreation opportunities, for our monthly entertaining and educational programs at the 1912 Building, for the bi-monthly news-letter, The Prairie Owl, for youth programs, for local conservation efforts, and for basic operating ex-penses. Paid PAS members receive a hard copy of the newsletter, PRAIRIE OWL.

We encourage you to submit your local chapter dues by September 15, 2008. You may even wish to include an additional donation for one of

2009 LOCAL MEMBERSHIP DUES ARE DUE

your favorite programs. Please in-clude any corrections to your ad-dress. Be sure to include an email address if you have one and we will add you to our email announce-ments list.

We, the Board members of Pa-louse Audubon Society, sincerely thank you for your support and en-courage you to attend as many of our programs or field trips as you can during the coming year. If you have any questions, please contact Terry G r a y ( 2 0 8 ) 8 8 2 - 1 5 8 5 clgtlg@moscow.com or James Storms, (509) 635-1272 nbutte@pullman.com.

Check our website regularly http://www.palouseaudubon.org/ for current information on programs and field trips.

James Storms, Membership

There is a new Northwest bird guide hot off the press entitled "Birds of the Inland Northwest and North-ern Rockies" that was written to help identify the birds of Eastern Oregon & Washington, Idaho and Western Montana. This book is a handy pocket size field guide that was writ-ten by three long time Northwest birders, Harry Nehls of Portland Oregon, Dave Trochlell of LaGrande, Oregon and Mike Denny of College Place, Washington. It was published by the R.W. Morse Company, Olym-pia, Washington.

There are 260 of the most common species in the region featured, and it contains outstanding photographs by many gifted western bird photogra-phers. It is a great field guide that can be taken everywhere there are birds in the great Interior Pacific Northwest. It will be available at our November Program Meeting.

cies was pretty much confined to west of the Cascade Range. It is now relatively common—preferring brushy areas, thick undergrowth, clearings, gardens, orchards, fence-rows, suburbs, stream edges, and open scrubby woods. The male Bewick's Wren learns its song while still on the parents' territory. It learns the song not from its fa-ther, but rather from the neighbor-ing territorial males. The song rep-ertoire developed before the first winter is retained for life.

Bewick’s Wren(from page 1)

A life history is a sequence of choices made by in-dividual animals that influence their survival and reproductive success. Individuals choose habitats in which to live, forage and breed, types of food to hunt, with which other individuals to mate and produce offspring, and how to avoid predators. Early choices usually constrain subse-quent ones. For example, choice of breeding habitat determines the array of nesting sites available and the places within reasonable travel-ing distances in which to seek food.

Males and females may make many different decisions. Male Red-winged Blackbirds, the species I have studied most intensively, are jet black with bright red epaulets. The streaked brown females are much smaller. During the breeding season, males acquire and defend territories, mostly in freshwater marshes. They devote much time to attracting females, obtaining as many as 10 mates. Females do not defend territories. They decide where and when to nest, with whom to copulate, and what food to bring to their offspring.

To understand how redwings make decisions and how those decisions affect their lives, for thirty years we studied birds on marshes in the Columbia Na-tional Wildlife Refuge near Othello. Unique combina-tions of colored leg bands allowed us to identify indi-

PAGE 4 THE PRAIRIE OWL VOLUME 37 ISSUE 2

MEMBERSHIP APPLICATION Y05-7XCH

NAME ____________________________________________ ADDRESS _________________________________________

CITY ____________________________________ State ____________________ Zip _________________________

PHONE _________________________________ EMAIL ___________________________________________________

Return this form with your check to: Palouse Audubon Society, PO Box 3606, University Station, Moscow, ID 83844

Behavioral Ecology of Red-winged Blackbirds

Gordon Orians, Professor Emeritus of Biology, University of Washington

NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY (New only) Palouse Audubon Society

Includes National Audubon Society and Palouse Audu-bon Society membership and subscriptions to AUDU-BON MAGAZINE and THE PRAIRIE OWL newsletter. Send check payable to National Audubon Society

Financially supports the programs and activities of the Palouse Audubon Society and includes an annual sub-scription to THE PRAIRIE OWL newsletter. Send your check payable to Palouse Audubon Society

Introductory Membership $20.00 Annual Membership $15.00

Student & Senior Citizen (62+) $15.00 For additional information call: (509) 635-1272

viduals at a distance. We determined which female built each nest, monitored the outcomes and measured DNA to identify parents of nestlings. We estimated lifetime repro-ductive output and identified factors that most strongly

influenced success. For males, success requires getting and holding a good quality territory. The many males that fail to get territories do not sire offspring. The number of fledglings a male produces increases directly with the number of years he holds a territory and the number of females that nest on his territory each year. When deciding where to nest, a female selects both an area and a male how-ever, other females may already have settled there. Although females do not copulate with non-territorial males, they copulate with males holding nearby territories. About one-third of the offspring we tested had fathers other than the male on whose territory they were born! Females may seek ex-tra-pair copulations because other males who had copulated with them

were more likely to help defend their nests and allow them to feed on their territories.

These studies, as well as those carried out on many other avian species, show that birds have much more com-plex lives than might appear first glance. Take time to watch redwings; you will find their behavior quite fascinat-ing. (From the Seattle Audubon Society newsletter)

VOLUME 37 ISSUE 2 PAGE 5

"The homeowner needs to care-fully evaluate deterrent devices, and not rely on anecdotal claims,” says Cornell professor and study coauthor Paul Curtis. "Many of the devices simply have not been ade-quately tested under field condi-tions,"

Vehrencamp used the tape streamers on her own earth-toned, wood-sided home and was pleased with the results. "It's a very simple, inexpensive solution. I would rather have these somewhat un-sightly streamers on my house and attract the woodpeckers with suet feeders—they're wonderful birds, and I love seeing them!"

By Pat Leonard for BirdScope

Winter 2008, Cornell Lab of Orni-thology

THE PRAIRIE OWL

Woodpeckers are beautiful and enter-taining unless they're turning your home's siding into Swiss cheese. If the birds are looking for insects, the holes are small. If they're creating a nest cav-ity, the hole is much larger and causes even more damage.

"A Downy Woodpecker that could fit in the palm of my hand made it his mission to dig into my cedar siding for two months," says Phil Miller of Ithaca, New York. "There were showers of sawdust everywhere—and a fist-sized hole that went right through to the insulation." Miller is not alone. Woodpeckers cause millions of dollars in damage to North American homes each year.

A Cornell Lab of Ornithology study surveyed 1,400 homes in the area around Ithaca to learn which ones were most enticing to woodpeckers. It also tested six common long-term deterrents to see how effectively each prevented woodpecker damage. The results were published in the August 2007 issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management.

"I learned a lot from these birds," says study author Emily Harding, who con-ducted the research as part of her mas-ter's program in wildlife management at Cornell. "They have a lot of personality, and a great ability to adapt."

It has long been known that homes that are badly infested with ants or car-penter bees are especially attractive sources of food. Exterminators often must be called in to stop the infestation. In addition, the study found that homes sided with vinyl or aluminum, or painted and sealed in light colors—such as white, yellow, blue, or other pastel shades—are less likely to get hammered than wood-sided or dark-colored homes. If new sid-ing or insect exter-mination are not options, homeown-ers can try scaring the woodpeckers away.

Harding says she and her team tested six deterrents: life-sized plastic owls with paper wings, re-flective streamers, plastic eyes strung on fishing line, roost boxes, suet feeders, and a sound system that broadcasts woodpecker distress calls followed by the

Knock on Wood Pat Leonard call of a hawk. Only the streamers worked with any consistency: the shiny coating and movement in the wind kept the wood-peckers at bay and completely eliminated damage at half of the 16 test sites.

"Birds are smart, and they get used to the other types of de-terrents, even the distress calls,” says Sandra Vehrencamp, a scientist at the Lab of Ornithology and one of the study's co-authors, "The sounds a r e o b n o x i o u s . Neighbors hate it—plus, it's just not ef-fective at all.”

"I've seen wood-peckers sitting right on top of sound de-vices as they played,” says Harding. ''I've seen them digging into houses with suet feeders a few feet away. I've recorded hours of video-tape with not one woodpecker ever coming to tap—yet new holes would mysteriously appear.”

Miller tried dousing the affected area with ammonia, hanging strips of aluminum foil, and dangling com-pact discs on strings. Each time, he says, the woodpecker moved to a new spot on the house—until one day it just disappeared.

''I'm knocking on wood that the problem m a y b e solved,” he says. "We haven't seen the wood-pecker in a

couple of weeks, so maybe we irri-tated him enough that he's pursuing other housing options for the win-ter.” The bottom line: nothing works all the time.

Scientists show what works—and what doesn’t—to stop woodpeckers from

pounding on homes.

Some of you might remember the fuss about the Caspian terns nesting near the mouth of the Columbia - they were eating a lot of juvenile salmon, including listed salmon. The fuss was about the plan by several Federal agencies (the Corps of Engineers, U.S Fish and Wildlife, National Marine Fisheries Service) to move the terns to an island closer to the ocean. The terns were not to be injured in any way, but were to be discouraged from nesting in the old site and encouraged to nest in the new site. Encourage-ment was through habitat manipula-tion and the placement of tern decoys and playing tern calls. Seattle Audu-bon and National Audubon sued to stop the plan. The chapters on the Columbia (including Vancouver Audu-bon) were either in favor of the plan or neutral.

After going through the courts, the plan was put into effect and it worked. The new tern colony boomed. This caused a new problem - too many terns eating too many juvenile

Palouse Audubon Society PO Box 3606 University Station Moscow ID 83844-3606

PALOUSE AUDUBON SOCIETY

salmon. The agencies developed a new plan to locate many of the terns away from the Columbia, using simi-lar techniques. Two such nesting sites have been prepared. A nesting site at Crump Lake in southern Ore-gon that was constructed in Febru-ary attracted more than 135 nesting

pairs this June. A third site is planned for Summer Lake in south central Oregon. Apparently, Caspian terns are a flexible species.

From the Vancouver Audubon Society

newsletter, ‘The Columbia Flyway’

CASPIAN TERN UPDATE

The mission of the National Audubon Society is to conserve and restore natural ecosystems

- focusing on birds, other wildlife, and their habitats -

for the benefit of humanity and the earth's biological diversity.

We’re on the Web at: palouseaudubon.org