Birds are on the move, so we are, too.
Recently, my husband and I took a trip to Whitefish Point to learn what birds are migrating south from their northern climes this time of year. Here we found the Whitefish Point Bird Observatory (WPBO), one of the best migration hot spots in Michigan. It is located at the end of a peninsula that juts out into Lake Superior and acts as a natural migration corridor for thousands of birds. It provides a shorter north-south route for them when crossing Lake Superior.
Whitefish Point provides important resting and feeding habitat for migrants that touch down here. It is also a Globally Important Bird Area, home to many rare breeding birds with more than 340 bird species recorded from the area.
Michigan Audubon conducts research at WPBO to learn more about bird migration, raise public awareness of birds and the environment, and promote bird conservation. Learn more about their interesting work at https://wpbo.org. When we learned that they gave free birding tours every Saturday and Sunday mornings from Aug. 16 to Nov. 15, we were in.
We joined our birding group Sept. 13. Birds are mostly quiet, not singing, and also not in their breeding plumage this time of the year, so they’re harder to see and identify. Thankful for an experienced guide who was able to bring birds close by mimicking their calls, we were able to see several species including warblers and shorebirds.
Our guide also pointed out birds flying well above us, black specs in the sky until you could focus in more closely with binoculars to make them out. He could also identify birds by their calls; he had a good birding ear. Mine is not so good.
At one point, our guide excitedly pointed to two dark specs in the sky, exclaiming “bobolinks.” Really? That got me wondering about bobolinks. I know a lot of songbirds and shorebirds migrate long distances, but what about the bobolink?
The only time I have seen bobolinks in the last several years has been in the spring at Horicon National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. There we heard breeding males singing and touting their breeding colors. The male is easy to spot this time of the year with its striking black and white feathers and its head topped with a large patch of light yellow.
According to the Cornell Lab All About Birds (AAB) website, bobolinks have a bubbly rambling song heard during the breeding season. During migration they are likely using their pink call to communicate within the flock. This must be what our birding guide heard.
Like many other songbirds, as summer ends and bobolinks molt, the male loses his bright colors, replacing them with buff and brown plumage much like the females. Interesting though, he will molt again when on his wintering grounds with his new feathers all having yellowish tips, his appearance still similar to that of a female. By spring, the yellow wears off revealing once again his striking breeding colors.
So how about migration? They excel at it. According to AAB, the bobolink is one of the world’s most impressive songbird migrants. They travel from their breeding grounds in the northern U.S. and southern Canada to southern South America every year, an about 12,500 miles roundtrip. During its lifetime, its annual journeys may amount in miles to traveling the equivalent of four or five times around the circumference of the earth.
Bird migration is fascinating. Birds find their way across hundreds to thousands of miles using magnetic cues, the stars and land forms to help them navigate. What especially helps the bobolink navigate, according to AAB, is that it can orient itself with the earth’s magnetic field due to iron oxide in the bristles of its nasal cavity and in tissues around the olfactory bulb and nerve (involved with the sense of smell). They also use the stars at night to guide their journeys.
Unfortunately, like many songbirds, bobolinks are declining in numbers. AAB reports that it is listed as an “Orange Alert Tipping Point species, meaning that it has lost more than 50% of its population in the past 50 years and has shown accelerated declines within the past decade.”
Loss of habitat, especially meadows and hay fields where they breed, remains a main reason for their decline. They are also shot as agricultural pests in the southern U.S., eaten in Jamaica and sold as pets in Argentina. To help in their conservation, people can mow their fields after nestlings have fledged and use fire and mowing outside of the nesting season to manage natural prairies.
I feel richer for having seen those two fleeting bobolinks on their journey south, such small birds in a large world on a great journey with many obstacles. They are amazing, and I wish them all safe travels.
Cathy Carnes is a retired biologist in Oconto who worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Green Bay Field Office and prior to that with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Regulatory Branch in Buffalo, New York. As endangered species coordinator for the USFWS, she helped conserve and recover federally listed threatened and endangered species in Wisconsin.