[BCNnet] Chickadees "vanished" by WNV

[Antlitz@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/8/02 12:18:48 PM, spackard@mindspring.com writes:

<<In my neighborhood in Northbrook and nearby Somme Woods, we lost a lot more

than the crows and chickadees. Also "vanishing" were essentially all other

birds except the mourning doves. No robins, woodpeckers, hawks, owls,

warblers, blackbirds, finches, sparrows. It was dismal and frightening.


Most of the birds seemed to be gone before the spraying started (I'm so

sorry I didn't take detailed notes) >>

This is what I seemed to notice out in the Barrington Hills area:

In mid June, the mosquitoes were terrible, and birds were abundant.

Some time after late June/July, when things started to dry up during the 
summer,  common white-tailed dragonflies showed up in force around my place, 
and in conjunction with that the mosquito numbers subsided.  I would tend to 
correlate this with the drying out of any mosquito breeding sites, though 
perhaps mosquito predation by the emerging dragonfly larvae also played a 
role.  

Some time in late July or very early August, young raccoons showed up and 
started playing total havoc with the bird feeders, destroying one of them.  
At this time I switched feeders and switched to seed that appeared to be 
unappetizing to raccoons.  At this time, bird numbers began to decline quite 
a bit.  Whether it was the seed change, WNV, dryer weather, raccoons eating 
them at night, who knows.  All I saw around at that time were mourning doves 
and the one resident cardinal pair.  The morning doves actually appeared at 
this time. They all seemed to be somewhat listless.  As I recall, this was 
around the time when the cases began to be reported.  But, it should also be 
noted that morning doves are birds that do well in dry, barren upland areas, 
and I also wondered if a lot of it wasn't due to the dryer conditions.  Maybe 
the other birds were hanging around water sources, or there had been a 
nesting failure.

The spraying picked up shortly after that, when the mosquitoes began to hatch 
out again with more rains. The spray truck went right by my house, but it 
never seemed to do much to the mosquito numbers.  The common white-tailed 
dragonflies seemed to disappear around this time, but I was never sure if 
that was just because they had run their cycle, or from the spraying.  The 
birds didn't come back, except that on the day after Judy announced the 
chickadee count I suddenly got a flush of woodpeckers, chickadees, cardinals 
and robins coming through the yard.  

What I get from this is that while observation and anecdotal reporting and 
public awareness and a concerned voice for wild living things are all useful 
and very important, it's also important to consider all the possibilities, 
understand the difference between correlation and cause, and not pile one 
jumped conclusion on top of another. 

Yes, the public needs to hear about the impacts on birds and other living 
things, and the importance of maintaining ecological sensitivity even during 
a situation that could cause paniced reaction.  The recent flurry of reports 
and articles have certainly met that need and gotten the public's attention.  
The next step is to build off of these preliminary reports by making use of 
sound scientific principles, and open-minded objectivitiy, so that 
credibility can be maintained over the long haul.  

I would be interested in hearing if the Breeding Bird Census, or Point Count 
work, or transect tallies, or any of these other long-standing methodologies 
have shown any signfiicant changes in their data this year.