(April 22, 2015, The Condor: Ornithological Applications)—How aware are you of the birds that live in your neighborhood? Do you know how many different species there are? Do enjoy your local birds, or find them annoying? J. Amy Belaire of St. Edward’s University, Lynne Westphal of the U.S. Forest Service, and Emily Minor and Christopher Whelan of the University of Illinois at Chicago visited urban neighborhoods in the Chicago area to answer these questions and learn more about how people see their backyard birds. Their results, published in a new paper in The Condor: Ornithological Applications, provide a fascinating look at the relationship between people and nature in a city setting.

Belaire and her colleagues surveyed the breeding birds in 25 neighborhoods adjacent to forest preserves in Cook County, Illinois, recording a total of 36 species, and sent questionnaires to the families in each neighborhood. While most people were excited to participate in a scientific study, according to Belaire, someone looking through binoculars in a residential neighborhood is bound to attract some attention; “The police were called several times to check up on us,” she says.

The researchers found that residents’ feelings toward birds were generally very positive, although a few people found bird droppings, nests in gutters, and other nusiances to be annoying, especially in neighborhoods where specific problem birds such as House Sparrows and Common Grackles were more abundant. Though the questionnaire asked respondents to estimate how many bird species were found around their homes, there was no relationship between residents’ perceptions of bird diversity and the actual species numbers observed in the bird surveys. Instead, the more favorable someone’s feelings about local birds, the more species they guessed were present.

“The interdisciplinary approach for this study stemmed from the knowledge that many of today’s pressing environmental questions can’t be answered by a single discipline alone,” says Belaire. “The social surveys helped shed light on the many things people value about birds in the neighborhood, especially the birds’ aesthetic qualities and the role they play in local ecosystems. Although residential neighborhoods in our study sites had surprisingly high bird diversity, we found that people didn’t seem to be entirely aware of this biodiversity.” The researchers suggest that programs such as citizen science projects can increase people’s awareness of their neighborhoods’ avian diversity. Even though the results showed a range of individual awareness of birds, this study reinforces the idea that birds are an important point of connection between city dwellers and the natural world.

Urban residents’ perceptions of birds in the neighborhood: Biodiversity, cultural ecosystem services, and disservices is available at http://www.aoucospubs.org/doi/full/10.1650/CONDOR-14-128.1. Contact: J. Amy Belaire, jbelaire@stedwards.edu.

About the journal: The Condor: Ornithological Applications is a peer-reviewed, international journal of ornithology. The journal began in 1899 as the journal of the Cooper Ornithological Club, a group of ornithologists in California that became the Cooper Ornithological Society.

(April 8, 2015, The Auk: Ornithological Advances)—After decades in ornithological obscurity, one of the world’s least-known birds is finally coming to light thanks to the persistence of a small group of researchers. Pablo Negret, Oscar Garzón, Pablo Stevenson, and Oscar Laverde-R. of the Universidad de los Andes have just published the results of their year-long study of the Black Tinamou (Tinamus osgoodi hershkovitzi) in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, including new ecological information as well as some of the first video and sound recordings of this elusive species.

The Black Tinamou is a chicken-sized bird found in the foothills of the eastern Andes, where it lives in tall, dense primary forest. It is extremely difficult to observe due to its secretive habitats and cryptic coloration. For their study, Negret and his colleagues focused on the southern Colombia subspecies, doing daily censuses in Alto Fragua Indi Wasi National Park, recording vocalizations, and setting up camera traps to capture images and video.

“The most challenging part of the fieldwork was the 4 to 6 kilometer walk along the transect’s steep trails each morning, from 800 to 1600 meters above sea level. However, these walks also gave me extraordinary moments like the observation of a Puma concolor along the trail or the moment when I had the chance to photograph the elusive Tinamus osgoodi after almost 9 months of trying,” says Negret. Through their observations, he and his colleagues were able to determine that Black Tinamous likely breed in March and April (when their vocal activity peaks), are most active in late morning, and eat primarily fallen fruit and seeds.

Black Tinamous live in an area where they are threatened by logging, cattle ranching, and hunting, and this study is an important step forward in gathering the information needed to effectively protect them. “Tinamous are widespread in Central and South America, and yet we know very little about the ecology and general biology of most species,” according to Patricia Brennan, a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor and tinamou expert. “However, tinamous are ancient birds, with a combination of many unique traits that include male parental care, female communal egg laying, and some of the most beautiful and conspicuous eggs in nature. The authors of this paper have gathered new information about one of the least-known tinamou species, and therefore they contribute significantly to our knowledge of this fascinating group of birds.”

New ecological information for the Black Tinamou (Tinamus osgoodi hershkovitzi) is available at http://www.aoucospubs.org/doi/full/10.1642/AUK-14-116.1. Contact: Pablo J. Negret, pablo.tiputini@hotmail.com.

About the journal: The Auk: Ornithological Advances is a peer-reviewed, international journal of ornithology. The journal has been the official publication of the American Ornithologists’ Union since 1884. In 2009, The Auk was honored as one of the 100 most influential journals of biology and medicine over the past 100 years, and currently holds the top impact factor among ornithological journals.

(March 11, 2015, The Auk: Ornithological Advances)— From museum drawers to the new species list: tapaculos add to the biodiversity of the New World tropics! After being misidentified and sitting in a museum drawer for more than seventy years, a group of bird specimens collected in Colombia and Venezuela has been determined to represent a previously unknown species, now dubbed the Perijá Tapaculo (Scytalopus perijanus). In a new paper in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, Jorge Avendaño of the Universidad de los Llanos and his colleagues describe how the Perijá Tapaculo differs from the other birds in its genus in its genetics, appearance, ecology, and vocalizations.

Tapaculos are a family of mostly small black or brown songbirds found in South and Central America, which forage for insects in grasslands and forest undergrowth. In 1941 and 1942, ornithologist Melbourne Carriker, Jr. explored the western slope of the Serranía de Perijá mountain range on the Colombian–Venezuelan border, where he collected 27 tapaculo specimens and sent them to the Smithsonian. At the time, they were mistakenly identified as Scytalopus atratus nigricans, a similar bird found at lower elevations, and in the following decades these upper montane tapaculos remained overlooked and unstudied.

In 2008 and 2009, however, a new set of specimens and sound recordings was collected in the same region visited by Carriker, and Dr. Avendaño and his colleagues were able to conduct a genetic analysis as well as analyzing the birds’ appearance and calls. The newly-named Perijá Tapaculo is a small bird with a buffy belly, gray back, and brown nape, and its song and calls are distinctly different from those of other tapaculos. Its high level of genetic divergence from its closest relatives suggests that that its high mountain habitat has isolated it from its cousins for a significant amount of time. “While it was known that two species occurred in the Perijá mountains, it was a distinct surprise that the upper elevational form differs as much as 8–9% from its closest relatives,” says tapaculo expert Niels Krabbe. “This emphasizes the importance of the Perijá mountains as an evolutionary center, and calls for further studies of its flora and fauna.”

Unfortunately, due to habitat loss in the region, this new species is already in trouble. “The species is more seriously threatened on the Colombian slope than on the Venezuelan slope because its habitat is protected by a large National Park in Venezuela,” explains Dr. Avendaño. “So, we recommend establishing a new national park or a network of reserves in Colombia connected to the Sierra de Perijá National Park of Venezuela. This binational park is necessary in order to effectively preserve the high species diversity and endemism of birds and other biological groups of the region.”

A new species of tapaculo (Rhinocryptidae: Scytalopus) from the Serranía de Perijá of Colombia and Venezuela is an open-access article available at http://www.aoucospubs.org/doi/full/10.1642/AUK-14-166.1. Contact: Jorge Enrique Avendaño, jorgeavec@gmail.com.

About the journal: The Auk: Ornithological Advances is a peer-reviewed, international journal of ornithology. The journal has been the official publication of the American Ornithologists’ Union since 1884. In 2009, The Auk was honored as one of the 100 most influential journals of biology and medicine over the past 100 years, and currently holds the top impact factor among ornithological journals.

(January 21, 2015, The Condor: Ornithological Applications)—The Grenada Dove (Leptotila wellsi) is a critically endangered bird found only on the island of Grenada. Past surveys of its population have found only 68-91 calling males (or 136-182 individuals, if they were all paired with females)—but is that accurate? For a new open-access study published in The Condor: Ornithological Applications, Frank Rivera-Milán of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and his colleagues visited a systematic grid of points in Grenada Dove habitat, with the goals of improving survey methods and identifying dove association with habitat features. They detected 160 individuals, plus or minus about 30. According to their results, doves were easiest to detect in early morning and late afternoon, and they were more abundant in areas with plenty of food and vegetation cover and less abundant in disturbed areas. The authors recommend that their survey method could be used to assess the dove population’s response to management strategies such as forest restoration and the removal of non-native predators. Read the open-access paper at http://www.aoucospubs.org/doi/full/10.1650/CONDOR-14-131.1.

(January 14, 2015, The Auk: Ornithological Advances)—Songs and calls aren’t the only sounds birds make. Some, such as the Greater Sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), also produce mechanical sounds called “sonations” with their feet, feathers, or bills. But do the mechanical “swishes” of male sage-grouse affect their mating success? In a new open-access study published in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, Rebecca Koch of Auburn University and Alan Krakauer and Gail Patricelli of the University of California-Davis reveal that male sage-grouse are most attractive to females when they increase the intensity of their swishing display as females get closer.

For two years, Koch and her colleagues observed and recorded the behavior of male sage-grouse on a breeding ground or “lek” in Wyoming, using microphones and video cameras to record the sounds they made and to keep track of which males got the most mating action. While the effects of the males’ vocalizations on their success had already been studied, the effect of their mechanical swishing noises had not, so the researchers identified which swishes on the sound recordings were produced by which individual birds in the videos and then analyzed whether there was any relationship between the acoustic qualities of the swishes and how many copulations each male achieved.

They found that males definitely varied in the length and frequency range of their swish displays, but these variations did not appear to have any direct effect on their mating success–it was all in the timing. The males that did the best were those who adjusted their displays as the social environment of the lek changed, upping the frequency ranges of their swishes when females got closer. This closely aligns with the results of a previously published study that found that successful males displayed at a higher rate when females approached, and the most successful were able to increase their display rate without any trade-off in display quality. The take-away message is that males track nearby females to display most intensely when it really matters.

“As researchers interested in sexual selection, it is easy for us to assume that all traits involved in mating displays are used as criteria in female mate choice,” explains Ms. Koch. “However, in sage-grouse, it appears that the tactical adjustment of displays as females approach is more important in soliciting mates than is display quality in itself.” Dr. Kimberly Bostwick of Cornell University, an editor at The Auk who studies sonation in manakins and was not involved in conducting the study, adds that this study “places a foundational stone for future work comparing sonations to vocal signals.” The functions of mechanical sounds in courtship are just beginning to be understood, and this paper is an important first step.

“Investigating female mate choice for mechanical sounds in the male Greater Sage-Grouse” is an open-access article that can be viewed at http://www.aoucospubs.org/doi/full/10.1642/AUK-14-63.1. Contact: Rebecca Koch, rek0005@auburn.edu.

About the journal: The Auk: Ornithological Advances is a peer-reviewed, international journal of ornithology. The journal has been the official publication of the American Ornithologists’ Union since 1884. In 2009, The Auk was honored as one of the 100 most influential journals of biology and medicine over the past 100 years, and currently holds the top impact factor among ornithological journals.