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November 2024

Did you know:  Some ground birds are considered hoppers, while others are walkers.  What about Juncos?  They’re hoppers!

Juncos are part of the sparrow family and as such they too prefer to feed on the ground, whether it be in the forest or your backyard.

Dark-eyed juncos are the quintessential snowbird.  Like retirees who flock south to Florida and Arizona for the winter, so, too, do Dark-eyed juncos flock south.  For them, south is the entire contiguous United States as well as parts of northern Mexico.  That’s because these tiny birds spend the warmer parts of the year on their breeding grounds in the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska.

Juncos can be identified by their dark hoods, white bellies, and white outer tail feathers that flash when they fly.  There are two common subspecies in Calgary:  “Slate-coloured” which are all grey and can look almost black and “Oregon” which have rusty back and sides.  In the spring, males have a very distinct black hood.

Dark-eyed juncos practice an interesting foraging method called “riding.”  They fly up to a seed cluster on the top of a grass stem and “ride” it to the ground where they pick off the seeds.

Juncos are ground feeding granivorous birds—which means they primarily eat seeds and grain.  Favourites are hulled sunflower seed, white proso millet, and cracked corn.  Because they eat near the ground, a low platform feeder or open tray is an excellent choice.  Choosing a feeder with a large oversized roof, or adding overhead protection, is helpful during winter months, since it keeps snow off the seed.

The number of bird species you live near could dramatically change your mental health.

By:  Mark Colley—staff reporter TORONTO STAR
 

Don’t just stop to smell the roses—make sure you listen to the birds and look at the trees, too.

A new study out of Carleton University has shown that living in neighbourhoods with higher variety of bird and tree species is associated with positive mental health.

It builds on a wave of research that shows how significantly exposure to nature can benefit your mental and physical health—decreasing stress, depression and anxiety along with rates  of diabetes, strokes and heart disease.

But the Carleton study—which analyzed data across 36 Canadian cities to show bird diversity increased the probability of good mental health by nearly seven per cent, and tree diversity increased it by more than five per cent—helps demonstrate a tie  between mental health and biodiversity too.

“We were surprised that (bird and tree diversity were) significant at all, because there’s so many factors that to into influencing people’s mental health in a city,” said Rachel Buxton, a professor at Carleton and lead author of the study. “When we compared it to things like employment or education or marital status or drinking, we thought that it just wouldn’t come out as important.  We were surprised it came out significant at all.”

The study used data from eBird, a crowdsourced app managed by Birds Canada, and a national forestry inventory to measure species diversity across cities including Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary.  Researchers then compared that data with self-reported mental  health.

Even when controlling for other variables like socioeconomic status, Buxton and the other researchers still found a strong association between bird and tree diversity and mental health.  As the number of bird and tree species increased in a postal code, so too did the probability of good mental health.

In fact, bird and tree diversity has a similarly-sized effect on mental health as your daily intake of fruits and veggies.

THE BENEFITS OF NATURE

The study did not establish that biodiversity causes good mental health and requires more digging to test the findings, Buxton said.  But her finding are in line with a vast ocean of research spanning years and countries that confirm a link between green space and health.

One study from the 1980’s showed hospital patients recovered faster after surgery if they had a view of nature from their window.  Research by Marc Berman, now chair of the University of Chicago’s department of psychology, found Toronto neighbourhoods with more trees had lower rates of health issues like heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and kidney and liver disease.

In 2012, Berman and others sent study participants on two walks—one in nature and one in the city—while asking them to perform attention and memory tasks.  Performance improved 20 per cent in nature and tests have demonstrated that simply showing people pictures or playing sounds of nature and cities can reproduce some of the same benefits.

There is also evidence showing how beneficial bird noises are.  Two years ago, German researchers found listening to recordings of a high diversity of birdsongs decreases depression, anxiety and paranoia.  After all, biodiversity applies to the ears as well as the eyes, according to Holli-Anne Passmore, a professor and chair of the psychology department at Concordia University in Edmonton.  She studies nature and well-being and was not involved in the Carleton paper.

She is currently researching whether listening to bird sounds while studying reduces exam stress.

“We are bombarded with noise,” Passmore said, “but sounds of nature tend to be something we can hear without using a lot of cognitive resources.”

WHY DOES NATURE MATTER?

Why nature is so beneficial is more of an open question.  One hypothesis is that because our brains evolved in nature, we can process natural stimulation more easily, with less work for the brain.

“We’re kind of living in kind of a very small window of time of the human brain,” said Berman.  “A lot of our cognitive processing was evolved in a very different kind of environment and maybe sort of tuned to that.”

It’s a possible explanation for why biodiversity is associated with good mental health, too.  Buxton said.

“If you have more different types of trees, more different types of birds, likely your needs are going to be met in that sort of environment—you have more things to eat, you have more shelter,” she explained. “We’ve evolved to be attracted to environments that have a higher number of species in them.”
 

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOU?

For individuals, the lesson of this research is to soak in all the nature you can. But it’s not just about time spent — it’s also about paying attention to the nature around you, Passmore said.

That could mean noticing trees, birds, bees or flowers when you walk from your house to the car or bus stop — or it could be as simple as taking your earbuds out and listening to the birds chirping, Berman said.

On a larger scale, the importance of nature for health should change the way we design cities, Berman said. Instead of building cities only to efficiently move and house people, nature should also be a consideration.

The bottom line: nature matters.

“Everybody kind of likes nature, but I think it tends to be viewed as an amenity and not a necessity,” Berman said. “What this research and other research is showing is that it’s a necessity. It’s not an amenity. It’s something we need.”

Visit www.meadowlarktours.com for more information

Contact: gavin@meadowlarkbirding.com

American naturalist John Kirk Townsend was the first to bring Mountain plovers to the notice of science, in 1834, when he found one along the Sweetwater River of Wyoming. His colleague, John James Audubon named it the Rocky Mountain plover, even though the species is a bird not of mountains but of prairie. Farmers and hunters sometimes refer to the Mountain plover as the “prairie ghost” on account of its ability to (seemingly) vanish into thin air—in fact, the bird usually just faces away from an observer and sits down, its upperparts indistinguishable from the pale tan colour of the grassland around it. Sadly, intensive conversion of prairies to agriculture and other uses has hit this species hard, with more than 80% of the population gone in the last half-century

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