Below is a message I
received from participating in the Conservation Through
Birding list-serve group. This story is about a dedicated
bird-lover that I am sure many of you can relate to.
Please consider helping preserve important bird habitats
locally so the birds will continue to have places to
flourish.
Here is our role model:
A witness to birds' fading song
Conservation: A pre-eminent ornithologist from Maryland
views more than 50 years of painful losses - and a few
victories.
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By Heather Dewar
Sun Staff
Originally published July 7, 2002
WOLF SWAMP - The wise old bird man has finished his
morning's work, but still he will not leave the woods.
By 11 on a bright summer morning, eminent ornithologist
Chandler S. Robbins, who turns 84 this month, has put the
finishing touches on a survey of bird life in a Garrett
County bog that he first studied more than 50 years ago.
He has gathered fresh data for a new version of an atlas
of Maryland's birds, which he edited. And he has spotted
a song sparrow's nest in a rotting stump on land that he
bought in the 1950s but rarely has time to visit.
His companions are heading for the car. But Robbins
stands motionless on the bank of a slender stream,
transfixed by the liquid song of a hermitthrush
perched in an oak.
Robbins has heard the melody thousands of times, but it
has not lost its power
to enchant him. He adjusts the volume on his hearing
aids.
Head atilt, he listens for several minutes, then
reluctantly turns to
go.
"Well, you hate to walk away from a singing hermit
thrush," he says,
moving
into the loose-limbed stride that usually leaves younger
hikers
stumbling in
his wake.
Robbins, who joined the Interior Department's Patuxent
Wildlife Research
Center
in 1945, is a man transparently in love with his work.
He has "almost a childlike love of birds, and it's
remarkable that he's
never
lost that. It's pure," said independent naturalist
Daniel Boone, his
one-time
student and longtime friend.
Robbins has lured several generations of Americans to
share his
passionate
pursuit.
He is the author of a classic field guide that helped
make bird-watching
one of
the nation's most popular pastimes, enjoyed at least
occasionally by
about one
in three adults.
He has also documented the decline of many of his beloved
songbirds as
the wild
woods, meadows and marshes they once inhabited succumb to
development.
In 1966, Robbins invented a continentwide survey of the
birds that nest
in
North America. Experts say the Breeding Bird Survey,
conducted each year
by
about 6,000 volunteer bird-watchers, helped create the
modern
conservation
ethic.
"I would put the invention of the Breeding Bird
Survey in this class of
things
that took place in the mid-1960s and early 1970s and
triggered the
awakening of
North Americans to environmental consciousness,"
said John W.
Fitzpatrick,
director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.
"It showed some of
the
patterns that people had begun to sense in the wind but
couldn't put any
numbers to ... that a significant number of birds were
really getting
scarce."
That knowledge inspired an international effort to save
the birds -
especially
those that migrate between North and South America - by
preserving the
land
where they spend summers and winters.
Now some of those birds are doing better, but others are
not. The
Breeding Bird
Survey shows that since 1980 about 98 species have
increased their
numbers -
but 114 are declining rapidly.
Robbins' long memory of a world richer in bird life
occasionally casts a
shadow
across his sunny nature.
He has pored through birders' journals back to the 19th
century. The old
accounts are full of descriptions of
"counter-singing" between males of
the
same species as they staked out territories and tried to
attract mates.
Such contests, with competitors chiming in from every
direction, are
rare now.
"These birds don't have to sing," he said
sadly. "There's only one."
Robbins began studying birds as a schoolboy in his
Belmont, Mass., back
yard.
As a young researcher at Patuxent, he explored Maryland
from the western
mountains to the lower Eastern Shore.
In brief summaries of his travels, published in birders'
magazines in
the late
1940s and early 1950s, Robbins described a wild Maryland
that was
already in
remnants:
"The last remaining virgin spruce bog ... The only
tract of virgin
Hemlock
remaining ... A magnificent stand of undisturbed
deciduous forest."
Most of the wild places he studied still exist - in some
cases because
of his
work. Most recently he was instrumental in helping
environmentalists win
state
protection for Belt Woods in Prince George's County, the
"magnificent
stand" of
400-year-old oaks, poplars and maples that he described
in 1947.
The state steps in
About half the trees were felled to make wood veneer,
said
environmentalist
Ajax Eastman of Baltimore. But in 1997, the state
acquired what was left
of
Belt Woods to forestall construction of a subdivision
where the last old
trees
stand.
Robbins also helped persuade the Maryland Ornithological
Society to buy
more
than a dozen tracts of prime bird habitat. The result,
said Boone, is
"one of
the best systems of private sanctuaries for birds"
in the country.
"When I was a kid, I was completely focused on the
birds and paid no
attention
to the habitat," said Robbins, "but it soon
became apparent that if you
don't
have the habitat, you don't have the birds."
Most people who start out as birders end up as
conservationists, he
said. "It's
a natural evolution. They get excited about birds, and
then they realize
...
that they have to conserve the land."
Robbins began drawing converts to conservation as the
lead author of
Birds of
North America, published in 1966 as part of the Golden
Guides series.
Robbins' book became the most popular field guide of its
time,
supplanting one
published in the 1930s by Roger Tory Peterson, and was a
birder's
favorite
until the 1990s.
"I still consider it a masterpiece,"
Fitzpatrick said. Its
continent-wide range
and realistic illustrations made bird identification
easier and more
fun, said
the Cornell ornithologist, who began using it as a
teen-ager.
A worried bird-watcher inspired Robbins' next project,
the Breeding Bird
Survey.
In the early 1960s, a young woman wrote him to say that
robins were
becoming
scarce in her neighborhood. She wanted to know whether
the same thing
was
happening all over the country.
"I had to tell her that we didn't know,"
Robbins said.
The question nagged at him. To answer it, he designed a
drive-through
bird
survey that exploited another great American passion -
the love of cars.
His scheme called for volunteers to get behind the wheel
a half-hour
before
dawn on a calm summer morning and drive a prearranged
25-mile route.
Every
half-mile, they would stop for three minutes to tally the
birds they
heard or
saw.
Their standardized checklists would go to Patuxent, where
experts would
use
them to form a picture of the comings and goings of more
than 400 bird
species.
Robbins made trial runs in Maryland, the Midwest and
Fairbanks, Alaska.
There,
he drove a sample loop around the clock, trying to figure
out when birds
sleep
and when they wake in the endless sunshine of Arctic
summer.
In 1965, he called a few friends and got 60 volunteers to
conduct the
first
survey in Maryland and Delaware.
The next year he called more friends and got enough
skilled birders to
cover
most major roads east of the Mississippi River. Within
three years, the
network
stretched to the Pacific Ocean.
"People were telling him at the time it was a stupid
idea, and Chan did
it
anyway," Fitzpatrick said. "It is a great
lesson in what one quiet,
unassuming
man can do if he's pretty sure he's right."
The annual survey, which continues to add new routes,
significantly
widened
bird researchers' field of vision. In place of a few
snapshots' worth of
information, they now have a kaleidoscopic image of the
entire
continent,
changing year by year as the bright flocks flow across
the land.
By the late 1970s, one pattern emerging from the survey
was the decline
of many
backyard birds - bluebirds, orioles, sparrows and more.
The data worried scientists and bird-watchers almost as
deeply as the
discovery
15 years earlier that eagles, hawks and other hunting
birds were
succumbing to
pesticides.
Frank Gill, the Audubon Society's science director,
credits Silent
Spring
author Rachel Carson with sounding "the first big
alarm" of modern
environmentalism. The survey's findings were "the
second big alarm," he
said.
"The Breeding Bird Survey has spawned the modern
industry of bird
conservation," Gill said. "Before, the whole
focus was on endangered
species.
Now everybody's focused on not taking any birds for
granted and keeping
the
common birds common."
In the 1980s, Robbins was part of a research team that
proved many birds
need
large, unbroken tracts of forest, marsh or meadow to rear
their young.
The researchers found that in fragments of wild land
surrounded by
development,
the birds had trouble finding food for their nestlings.
Forced to cross
open
ground, they were easy prey for predators.
The scraps of land became traps where unwary birds died
or failed to
reproduce.
The findings helped change conservation practices, said
David W.
Mehlman,
conservation director for the Nature Conservancy's
migratory bird
program.
Governments and private land preservation groups now try
to buy a few
big
pieces rather than a lot of little ones and to create
corridors linking
blocks
of land.
Robbins still wanders as widely as the birds he loves,
banding albatross
on
Midway Island in the South Pacific, studying songbirds in
Guatemala,
training
young ornithologists in South America. Last year on
Midway, he
recaptured an
albatross he had banded there 45 years ago - a
51-year-old female with a
nestful of chicks.
Wherever he goes, a battered pair of binoculars goes with
him. Robbins
said
they're the property of the federal government, which
issued them to him
more
than 40 years ago.
The dented eyepieces haven't been round since who knows
when. The
original
leather cover has been rubbed away. Its cowhide
replacement, stitched
for him
years ago by a Puerto Rican ornithologist, is on the down
side of
well-worn.
He could swap them for a snazzy new pair. But he won't.
"A lot of good birds in here," he said with an
affectionate pat.
Longtime friends say that of all his adventures, Robbins
is most elated
by a
study he is just wrapping up: a series of return visits
to Maryland
spots that
he first studied in 1949 and 1950.
"He's said many times it's a dream come true,"
said Boone.
"We're looking for changes, and figuring out why the
changes have
happened, and
thinking ahead to the future," Robbins says,
scanning the fringes of
Wolf
Swamp.
Old times and new
He surveyed this wild corner of Western Maryland in 1949,
following a
narrow
track past an old farmhouse and wading through the
swamp's deepest
meanders.
He found a sun-drenched bog tucked between two mountain
ridges. Marsh
grasses
and spruce trees grew in a basin of shallow water,
enclosed on two sides
by
forested slopes.
It was a haven for warblers, thrushes and woodpeckers,
two kinds of
hawks and a
rare owl. In the 1949 survey, he found 25 different
species in all. With
about
372 nesting pairs of birds per 100 acres, the air was as
thick with
melodies as
the midway at a county fair.
Today the farm track is a road leading to a private
school. A bridge
traverses
the bog. Water levels have risen, killing most of the
spruce trees.
And though most of the same bird species are still there,
"there are by
far
fewer birds than there were 50 years ago," said
Barbara Dowell, a
Patuxent
research center colleague who has worked with Robbins for
roughly two
decades.
"In many cases you find just one of a species, and
that's not good,"
Dowell
said. "If you see one alone, it's not likely you'll
see any the
following
year."
The two scientists haven't finished tallying the results
of the study,
which
they conducted between 1999 and last year. For one thing,
Robbins
refuses to
concede that a missing bird is gone for good until he's
absolutely
certain.
He and Dowell have returned to Wolf Swamp a half-dozen
times recently -
for yet
another project. They're collecting the first of five
years' worth of
data for
a planned update of the Maryland bird atlas.
Although few species have disappeared completely,
especially in lightly
populated Garrett County, Robbins expects the new edition
will show
changes all
across the state.
"It's interesting that we have the birds that we
do," Robbins said. "I
shudder
to think what the next 50 years will bring."
In Central Maryland, field-nesting birds are in grave
trouble as farm
fields
shrink.
The vesper sparrow, so named because it sings in the
evening, "is almost
completely gone in Baltimore and Howard counties,"
Robbins said.
The once-common Eastern towhee, which nests in abandoned
fields, is also
in
decline. "We don't have abandoned fields any more.
They're put to other
uses -
parking lots or shopping centers or whatever."
Devastation by deer
And everywhere deer are wreaking havoc, their numbers so
great and their
hunger
so relentless that they are changing the character of the
forests.
Not long ago on hillsides like the one above Wolf Swamp,
a layer of
shrubs and
saplings grew wherever sunlight reached the forest floor.
Today that middle layer is mostly gone. The trees are
stripped of their
leaves
as high as a tall man can reach. Only a scattering of
mosses and ferns
are left
at ground level.
It is the same all over the state, said Robbins.
Many songbirds that nest at or near ground level -
warblers, wood
thrushes,
vireos and others - return each year to the woods where
their parents
raised
them. Each year, the deer consume more of the nest sites
and
insect-laden
plants they need.
In many cases the nests fail because of the lack of food
for the young.
"A lot of them may nest for their lifetime and not
raise any young,"
Robbins
said.
As he walks along the banks of the Casselman River after
lunch, Robbins
stops
to listen to a redstart's song. The bird was once common
at the Patuxent
refuge, but deer have eliminated most of its nest sites
and it is a
rarity
there now."
"It's sad," says Robbins in an
uncharacteristically somber moment.
"It's really sad for me to have this knowledge over
a long period of
time, to
know we've made the changes that have caused the birds to
leave."
One hand ruffles his snowy flattop, as though brushing
away dark
thoughts.
"I refuse to be depressed about what's happened
because we can't do
anything
about that," he says. "I prefer to think about
the future and what we
can do to
protect the things we love."
Greg Butcher
21375 Ann Rita Drive
Brookfield WI 53045
262-797-8463
gregbutcherwi@hotmail.com
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