In parts one and two of this series, we’ve shown how pollution and disease are serious threats to waterbirds. But there’s another problem that takes an even greater toll on the populations of some birds.
“Well, the declines are most directly related to habitat loss and degradation,” said Amanda Rodewald with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
“We’re losing habitats that birds rely on or we’re changing the habitats in ways that they can no longer provide the resources that birds need.”
Rodewald said she knows that people are very concerned about climate change and its effects on birds, “and rightfully so,” but…“If you look at the data, what we know is that it’s still habitat loss and degradation. That’s the biggest driver of declines.”
The loss of habitat not only affects the chances of birds mating and nesting, it sometimes can trigger a change in behavior.
Sherry MacKinnon is a wildlife ecologist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources who specializes in colonial birds. During an interview with her on a remote Lake Michigan beach in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we talked about bird flu and botulism, but one thing she said really hit me. When some birds are forced out of their habitat, they’ll try to nest wherever they can.
“A lot of places where these birds are nesting are places like spoil piles. Particularly, I’m thinking about the Saginaw spoil pile. There are people that are collecting eggs and finding that those eggs are contaminated with PCBs or dioxins. And that’s bad news for birds. It’s bad news for us, right?”
Spoil piles are sometimes muck dredged from a river or harbor. That dredged material might be holding decades-old pollutants that got there when industry pollution was not regulated very well or not regulated at all.
Rebecca meets Rebecca the falcon
There are birds that have adapted fairly well to the human-built world, although Rebecca Williams found they might need a little human assistance.
There's a falcon named Rebecca who lives on the side of the Fifth Third Bank building in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan.
“She has attitude and she is protective and she is formidable," Mark Mills told me. He’s a regional manager for the wildlife division of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
I met up with Mills and volunteer Gail Walter on a blue-sky spring morning on the top of a parking garage across from the bank building.
We took a look at Rebecca up on her perch through the scope. She’s gray and white with dark eyes rimmed with yellow, with yellow on her beak and her feet.
She is beautiful, regal, really.
Walter calls herself a falcon liaison. She volunteers her time — a LOT of time — to keep close tabs on the nesting pair of falcons: Rebecca, her mate, Kewpee, and their soon-to-hatch babies.
“This only costs Gail money, she’s not paid," Mills said, laughing.
“Yes, but I get this beautiful office here at the top of the parking deck," Walter said.
The falcons have been nesting on the side of this building for more than a decade. They take turns sitting on the eggs, and flying around.
Mark Mills said he got a call from a guy from the bank back in 2013, "Saying, 'Hey I think we have peregrine falcons on the building and they’re trying to nest,' and that’s when I came down for the first time and met Rebecca.”
Ever since, Mills said they’ve had a bond, or at least he’s mesmerized.
“Stepping out of the elevator and having Rebecca staring at you through the glass, and really having a one on one interaction with her. She saw me, I saw her, she told me she didn’t like me and I said she was beautiful, and she turned around and flew away," he said.
Rebecca still isn't all that fond of Mills — he has to wear a hard hat if he visits the nest box on the side of the bank to band chicks, in case Rebecca decides to dive bomb him.
So, why are there falcons on a bank in Kalamazoo?
It’s a good news story, actually, but it didn’t start out that way.
“Much of that is a story known to many, connected to the use of DDT, which is a chemical pesticide, on the landscape, resulting in the eggshells being just too thin," Mills explained.
That affected falcons, bald eagles, and ospreys as DDT built up in the food web. Peregrine falcons eat other birds, including waterbirds. They disappeared from the eastern half of the U.S.
DDT was banned, and slowly, over decades, the falcons have been recovering. That’s due to efforts to help them reproduce, and they’re expanding into new habitats.
“They’re cliff nesters naturally, right? So they want to nest on a cliff somewhere. That’s a little bit limiting," said Mills. "There’s not that many cliffs around for nesting, but they’ve adapted to the use of large buildings.”
And there are nest boxes in a few cities around the state — Grand Rapids, Lansing, Detroit. And there are also peregrine falcons nesting on cliffs on Isle Royale in Lake Superior.
Falcons are still listed as a threatened species in Michigan. But they’re doing much better.
“They’re connected to our history here and it’s human behavior that endangered them and it’s some human behavior that’s enabled them to come back," Mills said.
Rescuing baby falcons from rooftops
Mills said for these Kalamazoo falcons, that has a lot to do with the work Gail Walter and the other volunteers do.
The most crucial part of helping these falcons is fledging time. That usually happens right around Memorial Day weekend.
Walter and Mills said the chicks can get a little ahead of themselves.
"Like teenage birds," Mills said, laughing. "They’ve got most of their flight feathers in, most of their down is gone, but they still a lot of times have a little peach fuzz on them.”
“We know when to start watching for these chicks to take their first flights. And they’re trying, but they can’t maintain altitude," said Walter. "And so we’re here to watch where they’re going, and then we take off running and try to find them. If they land on a rooftop, that’s great.”
They scoop up the chicks, and take them to a rehab center where they can safely learn to fly as their feathers emerge. Walter called it "flight school."
Most of the time, the rescues go well, although one time a chick was picked up off the street and the team had to get law enforcement involved.
“I’ve never expected to have a bird kidnapped before! Usually it’s hours of boredom sitting up here in the blazing sun or pouring rain, and then a few minutes of sheer panic," Walter said.
Walter said all those hours are worth it.
“I think they’re charismatic birds, they’re gorgeous, and just, their ability to survive in a lot of different environments is inspiring," she said. "I don’t want to see them, you know, take a downhill turn on my watch.”
You can take a look at the falcons on this nest cam.
Ospreys are also doing much better these days. They’re a raptor that eats fish, and they were also hurt by DDT. They like to nest in trees, on cliffs, and in cell phone towers.
Protecting wetland habitat
Other species don't adapt to the human-built environment and need very specific kinds of habitats such as wetlands to survive.
In a recent report, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said vegetated wetlands — the kind of habitat that many birds and fish need — are decreasing, and it pointed out the Great Lakes region is a particular concern. These reports come out every ten years, and the agency found wetlands in the U.S. were disappearing 50 percent faster in the last ten years than in the previous ten years.
And it could get worse. That’s because many wetlands lost federal protections last year.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Sackett vs. EPA case ruled a wetland is only federally protected if it’s directly connected by surface water to a lake or stream.
Last summer in Ohio, Ray Stewart showed me the Great Egret Marsh, a Nature Conservancy preserve next to Lake Erie not too long after the Sackett decision.
He’s an ambassador for the Ohio Wetlands Association. We were sitting on a bench, looking at part of the wetland preserve connected to a Lake Erie harbor. It’s still protected under the Clean Water Act.
“But if we look over our shoulder here, there is another marshy area that is part of this preserve. And it is it is totally isolated by an embankment surrounding it. But because it doesn't have a surface connection, then it doesn't fall under the new definition of Waters of the United States.”
So, it’s no longer protected under the Clean Water Act, according to the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Stewart said the two wetlands are equally valuable in helping to filter out contaminants and reducing flooding. Like all wetlands, they’re also among the most productive ecosystems for wildlife, especially waterbirds.
A state can make its laws stronger than the federal ones. Some of them were already in place before the ruling. But they don’t all have the same level of protections for wetlands. The eight Great Lakes states are a good example.
According to the environmental group Earth Justice, Minnesota and New York have some of the strongest protections for wetlands in the nation.
Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have fairly strong protections but they’re all different. Illinois, again according to Earth Justice, has the weakest wetlands protections in the Great Lakes region.
Ray Stewart said he thinks Congress needs to amend the Clean Water Act.
“So there needs to be a watershed-wide, as a minimum, management of these systems, which is why it's so important to have a federal program that can look at a broader, more comprehensive view," he said.
Stewart is not alone in that view.
The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) believes that state regulations are not a substitute for uniform federal protections.
“A state that’s doing a lot to protect its watershed but a neighboring state is not doing its part to protect the watershed, it’s going to likely have negative effects from pollution that’s coming from that other state,” said Jim Murphy, Director of Legal Advocacy at NWF.
Broader federal protections could help save wetlands from development in some places, but politically, it would be tough to get Congress to pass it.
Restoring wetlands
While some wetlands might be lost, there are efforts to restore former wetlands. A lot of wetland restoration projects are designed to attract ducks and geese for hunters. And because of those restorations, those populations of waterbirds actually have increased substantially.
Just north of Grand Haven at Ottawa Sands County Park, Andy Hinickle is reviewing a wetland restoration project designed to help other kinds of birds.
“Secretive marsh birds are still declining across the Great Lakes. Birds like Virginia rail, sora, pied-billed grebe are dropping in numbers quite precipitously. And it's concerning. The thing that's driving that is habitat loss,” said Hinickle. He is Audubon Great Lakes’ Senior Manager of Wetland Conservation.
Secretive marsh birds are called that because they’re mostly quiet and some hide in the wetland vegetation much of the time. They like wetlands that include native cattails and other wetland plants clustered in spots, but also leave some open water. Hinickle said it gives them a place for foraging and nesting.
“It really needs to be in the right condition for them to achieve both of those things. One is, great if they can nest, great, but if they can't find food, they're not going to pull off a brood. So, this site was an opportunity to create some additional marsh habitat, some emergent marsh habitat that these birds can nest and forage in.”
Some big construction equipment was grading the sandy area as we talked. Nealy Molhoek with Ottawa County Parks and Recreation said the changes she finds most interesting are happening elsewhere in the park.
"It's a six acre interdunal wetland complex. So, creating wetlands of varying elevations to serve as some ephemeral wetland, maybe vernal pools out there. So, it's stormwater storage, but also creating habitat with that."
Hinickle said these non-game species birds need more wetlands and better quality wetlands to give them enough space to reproduce and increase their numbers.
He said the wetland restoration projects to increase the number of birds that hunters like, such as ducks and geese, are helpful, but non-game birds need more specialized wetlands.
Restoring wetlands is important to birds and people
Some wetland areas are more difficult to restore just because of the scale of the task. The Saint Mary's River connects Lake Superior to Lake Huron. As the river meanders its way to Lake Huron, it opens up into Munuscong Bay.
“We have the largest black tern colony in Michigan here, right here in Munuscong Bay, which is a threatened bird here in the state of Michigan,” said Eric Clark. He’s the director of a consortium which includes Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.
He mentioned black terns because that bird’s population has dropped 7 percent each year since 1966 in Michigan.
While the terns are a point of pride, the large coastal areas of the bay have problems. For the most part, the wetlands have been taken over by an invasive non-native cattail. It has crowded out two important native plants: hard stem bulrush and what the Sault Tribe — in fact most of the Anishinaabe tribes — call manoomin. It’s a sort of wild rice.
Eric said they can’t completely get rid of the invasive plant, but they can mechanically remove enough to have areas of those native plants.
Robin Michigiizhigigookwe Clark is part of the tribal community, and also married to Eric. She said manoomin is culturally important to her people.
“Manoomin is part of why our tribe, our people, our communities are here now," said Robin.
She said creation stories describe how her people originated on the East Coast and were instructed to go west to where the food grows on water. That’s understood to be manoomin.
There’s another reason it’s important for Great Lakes Indigenous people to bring back the wild rice: birds. For the Anishinaabek people, humans are newcomers. Wildlife, birds, are their elder relatives.
“It’s our responsibility to understand, to observe these declines, to notice, to pay attention to these elder relatives. That’s part of our job as Anishinaabek or human beings. We’re the younger relatives. They are actively teaching us every day. They’re giving us instructions for how to live a good life, and what our roles, our gifts, and our responsibilities are.”
Both Robin and Eric are scientists. Eric said too often, Western science is all about maximizing yield and making ecosystems produce things for people.
“And the more I come to understand what it means to think about these systems from an Anishinaabe science perspective, it’s more about asking what these systems need from you, first and foremost, and it’s about: how are things balanced?” he said.
For Munuscong Bay, part of that balance is restoring what ducks and other waterbirds need. And to restore some parts of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians' natural heritage.
"You know, my generation, we haven't been able to go out and harvest manoomin here at Munuscong Bay. But the hope is that our kids will be able to go out and, you know, me as an elder can come out here, harvest manoomin and better incorporate that local manoomin into our daily lives," Robin said.
Climate change and habitat destruction
Several miles up the coast from Munuscong Bay is Whitefish Point. That’s a spot where some of the endangered birds that people have come to love nest.
People have been cheering the slow comeback of the Great Lakes piping plover from as few as 13 nesting pairs in 1985 to about 80 nesting pairs today.
The Seney National Wildlife Refuge includes part of Whitefish Point along the Lake Superior coast. Seventeen miles off the coast lies the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Sara Siekierski is the Refuge Manager for the complex of sites. She said the piping plover’s idea of a nest is not typical for birds.
“It’s a combination of sand and cobble. And so, they make small depressions in the sand that you can hardly tell are there if you’re not being very careful. And their eggs look similar to the cobble that also is scattered along the shoreline there," she said.
But much of the pebble and sand beach where piping plovers have nested at Whitefish Point has disappeared.
“Just this past November, we had some strong storm events happen and it has washed out a significant part of the point’s shoreline where we traditionally have had piping plovers nesting.”
About two acres of the sand and pebble point that extended out into Lake Superior were just gone.
“So, we don’t know how that will affect the plovers this year at the point. And although there’s other areas along the shoreline that they may find suitable, we just know that traditionally the area where they have nested is probably the most desirable is now underwater,” Siekierski said.
When the subject of Great Lakes piping plovers comes up among biologists in the region, they almost always ask if we’ve talked to Franci Cuthbert at the University of Minnesota. She’s something of a superstar expert in the piping plover world.
She said when the lake levels are high, or when we see these increasingly fierce storms that are fueled by climate change, piping plover habitat can be destroyed.
"When that happens, they come back to the traditional site and then the site is not there. They have to leave. Or, sometimes they'll hang out for a little bit. I guess, hoping for a change," Cuthbert said.
When they are forced to change sites, Cuthbert said they tend to have lower reproductive success.
Whitefish Point is just one example of a storm disturbing piping plover habitat. One year, the remnants of a tropical storm hit parts of Lake Michigan when its water levels were already high.
“And it hit North Manitou Island and wiped out a number of nests. And the birds never recovered. I mean, they came back and the adults were okay. They nested but the re-nests were not successful,” Cuthbert said.
Because piping plovers nest in the open on sand and pebble beaches, predators and people walking along the beach with their dogs are other significant threats to the birds.
Each year, agencies and volunteers monitor the beaches to keep people and predators away from the birds and their chicks. The population of piping plovers in the Great Lakes is making a slow comeback, but it takes effort and it needs more people to be aware of how vulnerable the birds and their offspring are when they decide to take a walk on the beach.
What can we do to help stop the decline of birds?
One of the things we asked Amanda Rodewald at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology was, with this steep decline in bird populations, what can be done?
She listed things like supporting candidates that have an interest in protecting the environment and supporting conservation organizations that are making a difference.
“And then, also think about your consumer choices, right? There are a growing number of bird friendly or biodiversity friendly products out there. So, for example, I work a lot with birds that migrate down to the Neotropics and over-winter in coffee plantations. Shade grown coffee, which is where coffee is grown under an understory of trees actually supports many species in the winter.”
But we also wanted to know what we could do at home. She said Cornell Lab has developed seven simple actions to help birds.
“And those include things like, keeping your cats inside, putting decals or changing your window coatings to reduce collisions because window collisions kill a ton of birds. Don’t use chemicals on your property and have kind of bird-friendly habitats. So, those kind of steps are other ones that people can take.”
We started this series by noting there are nearly three billion fewer birds in North America than there were 50 years before.
That study came out five years ago. If that rate of loss has continued, it's possible we have lost another 300 million birds.
Because of the efforts of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and organizations such as Ducks Unlimited, duck and goose populations are doing well.
But some terns, those secretive marsh birds, and common birds such as great blue herons and killdeer are not doing as well.
If the disease, pollution, and habitat loss outlined in this series are not addressed, we’ll continue to see population declines of many of those birds.
The Bird Connection was written and produced by the Environment Report’s Lester Graham and Rebecca Williams. Vincent Duffy was the editor. The program was made possible by a grant from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. This was a production of Michigan Public in partnership with the Great Lakes News Collaborative.
