Chances are you’ve seen a few dead birds in your lifetime. Wild creatures lead a perilous existence, and the modern world has made survival a tougher go than it ever was. Birds once only had to face threats from a world that changed little over the millennia, weather and starvation and hungry predators topping the list. Nowadays the end can come from so many more sources, courtesy of h.sapiens, things like speeding machinery and glass buildings and poisons in your diet, not to mention the disappearance of most or all of the appropriate living space you once thought would be yours forever. Then there’s that species’ predilection for casually taking you out of this world with a bullet or shotgun pellet, oftentimes when they aren’t even hungry. Perilous, indeed!
For many, an encounter with a dead bird is most likely in the spring, when offspring are fledging, some leaving the nest (or getting pushed out) whether they’re ready or not, into the dangerous World Out There. There is something especially sad about finding an inert baby bird on the sidewalk, though of course this is all according to Ma Nature’s plan. Around here it’s usually a robin or a house sparrow, and the moment is a bit less poignant when you consider how these two species are fabulously prolific, despite the losses.
Riding a bicycle is an especially efficient way to bear witness to all manner of roadkill, and besides the many squirrels and sometimes unbelievable numbers of squashed chipmunks, there is the occasional robin or bluejay or warbler species, and in our neighborhood even a slaughtered herring gull every so often. Gulls are big birds and the foolish one that gets hit while feasting on somebody’s tossed out pizza or Happy Meal presents an especially gruesome picture. It’s curious, but American crows are a fairly common sight nibbling at roadkill along the Massachusetts Turnpike, a very busy high speed roadway, and one never sees a crow that has shared the fate of its meal. Red-tailed hawks also appear in the trees alongside on a regular basis, and they, too, seem to have managed a way to succeed at this tricky game. Which is not to say it never happens, as the odds can catch up you at any time, for that is how the universe works.
Folks who walk the streets of major cities during migration report any number of dead birds on the sidewalk, many of them colorful warblers who were minding their own business, headed for points north or south, when they became confused by the bright lights of the many glass buildings below, or if it was daytime thought they were flying into a clear blue sky that cruelly turned out to be just a reflection. The park in Post Office Square in downtown Boston, a lovely green space in a forest of glass towers, is a hotspot for these sad encounters.
In October of 2023 a particularly notable event occurred one night at McCormick Place in Chicago, when over 1000 birds heading south were found dead outside the next morning. McCormick Place is situated at the edge of Lake Michigan, a major flyway during migration, and it seems the lights were all on that night for some trade show or other, a recipe for disaster if you’re a migrating bird. It’s a sign of the times that they’ve spent over a million dollars modifying the glass surface to resolve the issue (who knew the technology even existed?) and many cities are developing “lights out” policies for their skyscrapers at certain times of year. There was a time not too long ago when almost nobody cared, certainly nobody who could make a difference. Call it progress.
Of course everybody knows dead birds don’t talk. Like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch, they may all be “singing with the choir invisible,” but there’s nothing there for us to hear. No “Polly want a cracker,” nothing but silence from the beyond. This thought came to mind a few weeks back, while spending time in a room full of more intact dead birds than one could ever imagine, collected over a hundred years or more from all parts of the world. There were drawers and drawers of them, an orgy of colors and shapes and sizes, all of them available up close and personal, and of course none were about to fly away, as so often frustratingly happens in the field. Nope, one could savor these birds in all their rich detail for as long as it took, with an intimacy that in the end felt a bit strange. They were gorgeous and fascinating but could only come to life in one’s imagination, and in this context maybe that was enough.
The point of this collection was not some morbid pleasure in savoring the aesthetic glories of our feathered friends (though in a way it was kind of that), but science and the countless purposes devoted to better knowledge and understanding that have always been science’s thing. We were, after all, at the world-renowned Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Please note that it’s “lab” and not “laboratory,” which might be a meaningless distinction, but it’s a fact that the Cornell Lab is known far and wide to many who are by no means academics. It has more than its share of those, of course, but the Lab’s major claim to fame is its devotion to “citizen science” and the contributions of observers from all over the world regarding what birds and bird behavior they’re noticing in their neighborhoods.
To its great credit, the Cornell Lab has been groundbreaking in providing everyday people the tools to turn their enthusiasm for the natural world into contributions towards a better understanding of the current state of that world and where it might be headed. This includes eBird, a reporting app that links observers into a vast network in real time, as well as Merlin, a bird identifying app. If Merlin were just based on visuals, it would be kind of a clever and efficient update of the hallowed “field guide,” that has existed in printed form for many decades. But recently, Merlin has offered an audio version, which means it can provide a pretty good guess as to what you’re hearing, as well. The Cornell Lab has been instrumental in developing the science of collecting animal sounds, not just birds but whales and elephants among others, which has led to a whole exciting new realm of natural science.
At first Merlin might seem like just another neat thing, but it’s way more than that. When it comes to birds, think about it: far more birds are heard than are ever seen. Talk to any bird fancier who goes out on walks to see what’s in the local park or woods, or further afield on serious trips to savor all the cool species to be found the world over, and they’ll tell you, often with some degree of frustration, how tough it is to see all those birds calling out in the forest. Learning bird calls takes talent, dedication, and tons of experience, and many who wish to master it never come close. This is especially true when it comes to species they don’t know from their everyday experience (and sometimes even then – many birds have many different vocalizations). Merlin has changed all that. Even better, people with a limited interest in the natural world are trying it, and discovering a world of birds in their backyards and neighborhoods they’d never previously noticed, a richer world than they’d ever known existed, which has to be a good thing.
Which gets us to the heart of the Cornell Lab’s mission: promoting the natural world, and not just the birds. The efforts to save that world from the destructive impulses of our species, which has not exactly shared the planet in any equitable way, is far from over, in case you hadn’t noticed. It was Cornell that released the report a few years back that revealed the loss of 2.9 billion birds from N America in the past 50 years, a sobering wake up call that got a lot of press. They’re a Lab, not a laboratory.
So it should come as no surprise that our trip to the Lab in Ithaca NY with Mass Audubon involved more than simple curiosity. It was a pilgrimage, similar to a Catholic going to Lourdes or a Muslim to Mecca. Okay maybe more like a baseball fan trekking to Cooperstown or a pop music fan to Cleveland and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At any rate, our little band of eBird fanatics were groupies of the purest kind, fulfilling a longstanding dream. Going with Audubon got us into the back rooms with enthusiastic and informative guides, meaning our visit to this special place was extra special. The recently completed rehab of all the exhibits means they’re all now interactive state-of-the-art, and if your experience with nature exhibits is limited to decades-old traditional presentations of the kind found at most national park visitor’s centers and science museums, you’ve no idea what can be done. Check it out sometime, and take the kids.
The place exceeded everyone’s expectations, though afterwards one could remain haunted by all those neatly organized drawers of bird “skins,” as they’re called. This was especially true of those containing birds now extinct. We got a look at heath hens and passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets and of course, the Lord God bird, the ivory-billed woodpecker. It was likely we’d never see those birds anywhere outside of that room, dead or alive. There was a time not long ago when hope was revived that a few ivory-billed woodpeckers were alive in a Louisiana swamp. People claimed to have heart it, or possibly even seen it. Searches were organized, books were written, a documentary was filmed. In the end it might as well have been about Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster.
At one time, h.sapiens’ occasional removal of other species from the face of the earth was hardly a big deal, something even celebrated by many. Think of the removal of the American bison, nearly exterminated as a means of forcing the indigenous tribes off of the plains. Somewhat less intentional was the inadvertent total destruction of the passenger pigeon, whose estimated population of three to five billion made them the most abundant bird in the world back in the 19th century. It turns out they were great eating, and anybody could make a buck by aiming upwards at one of their miles-long flocks and blasting away. There was a ready market for whatever came down, birds-as-commodity, which is always a bad deal for the birds.
The ivory-billed woodpecker went the way of most lost species, whereby all suitable habitat was chipped away until there was nothing left. Global warming holds the possibility for many more disappearances to come, in what is being called the 6th Extinction. Right now the lack of any consequential action to prevent this is (or should be) troubling, to say the least, though in the recent US election the topic was a non-starter for either major US party. To paraphrase that old adage from the National Safety Council, the species we save might be our own, but will we, before it’s too late?
Does the silence of all the birds in those drawers nonetheless speak volumes, with the loudest unheard voices belonging to those species that ain’t coming back? If we had some magical Merlin device, one truly worthy of the name, could we hear those voices from the dead, and would they have much to say? Maybe they’d be angry and resentful, full of “good riddance and we can’t wait for this wonderful planet to finally be rid of your creepy species!” Or might they have a little compassion, as in “we wouldn’t want what happened to us to happen to any of the Creator’s efforts, yours included, so get your act together, though frankly most of us here in the beyond aren’t placing any bets on your success.”
Even with our magical device there’s a good chance there’d still be silence. What’s the point of their saying anything to us? Those of us who left the Cornell Lab feeling haunted probably were haunted already by such thoughts before this encounter, but our viewing added a new level of poignance to these matters. And the final impression of the Lab’s work is anything but sad or troubling, as above all the place is an epicenter for efforts to change history, and good luck to them. The final word is that our mood was celebratory, our groupie expectations spectacularly met.
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Ithaca is a bustling mildly sprawling city at the southern end of Lake Cayuga in central central New York state, south of Rochester and Syracuse. The tourist brochures advertise the area as the Finger Lakes region, a wonderfully descriptive term based on the distinctive row of long narrow bodies of water running north to south, that stretches for maybe a hundred miles east to west. A glance at the map really looks like somebody scratched these furrows in the land, one could say God, if God had a hand like Freddie Krueger’s. If course your God and mine is much kinder and gentler than that, and the fact is the job was done with glaciers over the course of millennia, and the earth and rocks endured no pain, at all.
Cayuga Lake is the biggest of the Finger Lakes, 38 miles long and a couple miles wide on average, and mighty deep at 435 feet. Ithaca, like a great many towns in NY, has a name from antiquity. There’s an Athens and a Sparta and a Troy, New York, to name a few others, and surely you know that Ithaca is the Greek island in the Ionian Sea, from which the epic hero Odysseus hailed and towards which he was headed in the Odyssey. Cayuga’s lakeside setting might’ve made Ithaca a logical name for the town, back in the beginning. Surely you also know that Odyssey is the name of the popular Honda minivan, and seeing one in the parking lot at the Lab could only make one wonder: Does the owner know of the Ithaca/Odysseus connection? Is it possible they’re even a professor in the Cornell University Classics Department? Would they rather have a Civic or Accord, but felt as an Ithaca resident this mini-van was the only logical choice? Is the local Honda dealer a big fan of Homer, and do they offer a discount on this model, or include copies of Homer’s works with each sale? So much to ponder!
The lake got its name from the local native tribe, the Cayuga, who, along with the Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, and Onondaga, comprised the Five Nations of the Iroquois, which was the language they all shared. The term Iroquois, curiously enough, is not the term by which they are known amongst themselves, which is Haudenosaunee. Just a few months previously we happened to attend a powwow of the Mohawk tribe a few hundred miles south of Ithaca in the town of Howe’s Cave, where there is an Iroquois museum located on ancestral lands. There were lots of Mohawk families, a craft sale and fry-bread stand, a band concert and dancing, sometimes many generations together. It was joyous.
Like most indigenous peoples in the world, the Haudenosaunee have survived against all odds. One could say this about any number of animal species, as well. It is possible the tribes of the Five Nations have inhabited the region for thousands of years. If their ancestors could talk, what would they tell us about the birds and animals they encountered before the coming of the Europeans? The abundance and variety must have been incredible, the habitat little changed since the recession of the glaciers, all of it destined to change radically.
Our drive down one side of Lake Cayuga and up the other revealed a very tidy landscape of farms and towns and some number of wineries. Most of it looked well maintained and prosperous, in contrast with rural New York south and north of here, agricultural lands with which we were quite familiar and which, frankly, suggested that good times had long passed. The Finger Lakes is tourist country, and the odds are good that some number of the houses are not the owner’s primary residences, but that’s just a guess.
As an Audubon group, we fulfilled our duty and mission by stopping at any number of lakeside spots and millponds and woods. One can count on any such group to be a crack bird-finding outfit, finely-honed eyes and ears that probably never miss anything that’s out there, unless it’s hiding silently under a rock, and what bird does that? And all of them, of course, carefully and accurately identified. This can be tough with swans, but our group leaders knew all the fine distinctions so as to not confuse the Mute with the Tundra or the Trumpeter, all three of which we encountered. It was very entertaining to travel slowly down the lakefront, stopping in all the immaculate town and state parks that are clearly busy places come summer, now left to the birds and the dog walkers until next spring.
Another claim to area fame is the geology. The glaciers left behind the lakes, and another part of the legacy are the many gorges, as the gaudy tee suggests. There are many that are nowhere near Ithaca, though another feature of the trip was one just outside of town, Taughannock Falls State Park. The geology made for a spectacular meander alongside a creek that ran into the lake. At the head of the gorge was the tallest single-drop waterfall east of the Rocky Mountains, which was hard to believe, but State Park brochures don’t lie. Fall was a good time to visit, as one can imagine the summer crowds must overwhelm the place. Also the lack of leaves made for better views. Our guides catered to the group’s interest with the promise of Turkey vultures gathering up by the falls. The TV’s delivered on this one, and there was a moment when we glimpsed them mixing with a few unexpected Black vultures and a single Peregrine falcon, quite a moment. Blacks are a common bird in Florida but almost unheard of in upstate NY in November, but there they were, and you can be sure our group did not confuse them with the Turkey V’s, no way.
The final feature of the trip was a visit to Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, up past the northern tip of the lake. It’s a major stop for migrating ducks this time of year, many returning from a busy summer up in Canada, where they cavorted in the family way amongst the prairie potholes of southern Manitoba, a major duck destination in case you didn’t know. Montezuma is a great place to be during migration as it provides a vast wetland rich with whatever it is ducks eat. For birdwatchers, it has its charms, though there are only a few places where one can get out of one’s vehicle, and the best looks go to those with the big spotting scopes and the long lenses. Much of the action is either sort of far away or very far away, and it works best by far for those seated on the left side, with the windows down.
Our arrangement suffered insofar as only a few from our group got the choice seating, one van only allowed for the front seat windows to go down, and worst of all, the weather was very cool and damp, with a raw wind, so vision out the windows was obscured. In Boston the word for this kind of weather is “raw,” and of course one can dress for it but one’s hands and feet might suffer a bit. This place was for the birds, literally, which is of course as it should be. All of us got a great look here and there at our personal fave species – all ducks are beautiful, right? – but of course the major point of this exercise, for some of us, at least, was to simply behold the spectacle of vast numbers, more than one could count as far as the eye can see. Of course, it is part of the Serious Birder’s Code to try and count everything anyway, and those counts supplied by our trip leaders are included in the pictures, which were taken in ideal brightness at some point in history and put up on the Cornell Lab’s website. Brightness was not a thing on our two visits to Montezuma.
An old-timer at the visitor’s center theorized that the place is highly subject to lake-effect weather, a precipitation phenomenon ruled by the weather gods that reign over nearby Lake Ontario. For those paying attention, Rochester, Syracuse, and most especially Buffalo NY are notorious for gigantic snowfall totals many winters, and lake-effect is the usual culprit. Call it a moisture-enhancement machine, and dampness and rawness are its fall products, which can make nature-loving an ordeal for the less hardy visiting Montezuma. Hey, just stay in your car, roll down the window, and crank the heat on extra-super-high, and you’ll be fine.
Of course the ducks don’t mind any of this, at all, which is part of the beauty of the whole experience. One had them to thank for providing the antidote for any haunting thoughts about the End of Nature and the role our species in particular has long played in this sometimes tragic drama. Which remains far from over, by the way. In the long trajectory of existence, most species are just a blip, and ours is no exception. The point is to mourn past losses and celebrate today’s glories and make efforts to limit the damage. That’s what trips like this and the work of places like the Lab are all about, isn’t it?
