Birding News and Features

50th Anniversary at Kiptopeke

The Kiptopeke Songbird Station will celebrate a remarkable milestone in fall 2012...it's 50th season! Begun in 1963 by volunteers working under the Virginia Society of Ornithology, it's the second-longest running such station in North America and is now operated by Coastal Virginia Wildlife Observatory, under Master Bander, Dr. Bob Reilly of Virginia Commonwealth University. 

2011 Virginia plover Survey

2011 was pretty decent year for piping plovers in Virginia with 188 breeding pairs. The statewide productivity was estimated at 1.36 fledged young/pr. Hopefully 2012 will be turn out to be just as good or better! I'd like to thank all you who have contributed to the survey, monitoring and habitat enhancement efforts and look forward to working with you again this year.

Ruth Boettcher
VA Dept. of Game and Inland Fisheries

American Bird Conservancy petition to regulate the wind industry

American Bird Conservancy (ABC) was recently quoted in an article on wind power and Golden Eagles that has resulted in several responses. We wish to clarify our position, which we believe was misrepresented by quotes taken out of context.

eBirding your Christmas Bird Counts

December 14 will begin the 112th Christmas Bird Count (CBC) season, and the first big weekend of counts will be 17-18 December. The Christmas Count is the largest and longest-running ornithological citizen science project. Its data are a great complement to what we are collecting in eBird, and indeed the CBC has paved the way for eBird in many respects. It is not a problem to enter data in eBird and then submit it for the CBC too, since the two projects are collecting data in similar ways, but at different scales. eBird can be a great way to store your sector-level data and compare it from year to year.

Good Whimbrel News Update (Mostly)

The report of the illegal shooting of two Whimbrels (Machi and Goshen) that were part of a migration study, and which had been tracked via satellite for 2 years was posted to the VA Bird List on September 13 and 14, 2011. The following is an update from Fletcher Smith (research biologist with The Center for Conservation Biology of The College of William & Mary / Virginia Commonwealth University).

"After arriving in Guadeloupe on Tuesday afternoon, a local conservation official and I went to the Port-Louis swamp where Goshen was shot. We made a brief tour of several of the primary hunting locations, noting roughly 10 hunters on a hot, sunny, windless Tuesday evening.