A Century of Observing Great Lakes Waterbirds

James P. Ludwig Ph.D

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No About the Book information available at this time.

Sujets

• birds
• Ecology
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 23 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669870739
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

A CENTURY OF OBSERVING GREAT LAKES WATERBIRDS
 
Insights Gained by Four Generations of Bird Banders
 
 
 
 
James P. Ludwig Ph.D
 
 
Copyright © 2023 by James P. Ludwig Ph.D.
 
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6698-7072-2

eBook
978-1-6698-7073-9
 
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 03/23/2023
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
541340
CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter 1 Learning the languages of Great Lakes waterbirds.
Chapter 2 The Importance of Bellow Island, Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan.
Chapter 3 Great Lakes Waterbird Population Explosions after World War II.
Chapter 4 Three distinctly different ecological regimes in the last century.
Chapter 5 Understanding the population dynamics of waterbirds.
Chapter 6 Important research and management questions for Great Lakes ecology: The critical roles of scientists and managers of Great Lakes resources.
Chapter 7 Midway’s albatrosses.
Chapter 8 Change with the Covid-19 pandemic: Enduring effects of Great Lakes waterbird epizootics.
Chapter 9 Concluding thoughts – Speculations on possible futures.
Literature Cited
Appendices: Historic letters of interest to waterbird ecologists found in Claude C. Ludwig’s papers.
 
 

PREFACE
Many families have unique passions others may regard as strange, but these interests may signal a family engaged in something for the common good even if others have no interest. People who study birds include many Audubon Society members who observe and accumulate lists of wild birds seen, technical researchers and a few who band birds to generate data on bird populations, their migrations and survival rates. The Ludwigs were bird banders. This book recounts nearly a century (1927 – 2023) of the Ludwig family bird studies, their banding passions and the useful data produced about waterbirds of the Great Lakes and albatrosses of Midway Island in the North Pacific Ocean. Analyses of data collected by many ornithologists show waterbirds respond to changing ecosystems as accurately and usually more quickly than well-trained scientists. Waterbirds reflected many changes of the last century and almost always long before humans measured how and theorized why ecosystems changed. Because waterbirds extract all they need from where they live, they must adjust to changes imposed on their ecosystems or die. Their numbers, body condition and many other responses by these populations reflect change as it happens while scientists remain in warm homes often resorting to computer models and theorizing to explain what happened and speculating about why. Waterbirds do not create models, theories or hypothesize effects; instead, they document change by the responses of their populations. After more than six decades of work on Great Lakes waterbirds I have come to believe there is wisdom in considering what waterbirds tell us by simply accessing the information embedded in those responses.
In 2016 I came upon three long-stored boxes of family documents and letters accumulated by my father and grandfather between 1921 and 1996. These papers were stored for decades and finally opened fourteen years after dad’s death when I had time to read them during my own retirement. These records held historic data, two unpublished manuscripts, the text of a 1933 speech to the University of Michigan’s bird club recounting dad’s earliest Great Lakes bandings of common terns herring gulls, ring-billed gulls and Caspian terns, letters between many banders, agency staff and even accounts of the military service in the South Pacific during WWII. I have opted to publish the most salient of those records to document how a group of obscure amateur naturalists compiled data and collected specimens for museums between 1922 and 1950 when the banding Great Lakes waterbirds was the hobby of a few eccentrics. Most modern agencies that now manage the Great Lakes did not exist in either the United States or Canada until the environmental activism in the 1960s and Earth Day in 1970 provided the political will to create them. Images of many original letters between these amateur biologists, agencies and legendary biologists including Frederick C. Lincoln are included. The roots of the US federal wildlife refuges in the upper three lakes, an early enforcement action taken under the 1918 North American Migratory Bird Treaty and the role of the Inland Bird Banding Association that linked these amateur biologists in the common cause to band waterbirds after the first world war are documented here. Then, recent data sets from extensive research done since the 1950s are summarized to provide a concise recounting of how waterbirds have responded to invasive species, the changes man has imposed on watersheds, discharges of synthetic contaminants, climate change and nutrient pollution, building on data collected by these early bird banders.
The many alterations provoked by man and inflicted on these lakes have spawned three distinct ecological regimes over 12 decades. The goal is to provide context for a fulsome understanding what influences and controls these lakes today and the mechanisms revealed by waterbirds that predict what we may expect as new alien species and climate change arrive. Environmental management is the art to understand what affects valued resources to be able to manage and enhance those resources for our benefit. Care for any ecosystem is identical to care required of human cultures. For, as George Santayana observed a century ago, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” My goal is to mine historic records left by banders for the wisdom we must acquire if we are to manage the Great Lakes as sustainable ecological systems - our most fundamental obligation to both future human generations and the entire Great Lakes biota including those magnificent waterbirds.
 

This book is dedicated to the man who started this work – Dr. Frederick Edwin Ludwig – photo in 1960 at the start of four decades intensive surveys of Great Lakes Waterbird colonies using his own boats.
CHAPTER 1
Learning the languages of Great Lakes waterbirds.
Butterflies, bats, many insects and birds fly or float on gossamer threads in air, a medium denied to humans unless sophisticated technologies and immense energy are applied. I have long wondered what waterbirds might teach humans if we could converse. Waterbirds of the Great Lakes have revealed in the 20 th and 21 st centuries much that is relevant to the health of these ecosystems and humans that use the lakes but most often we take them for granted. I have yet to learn the syntax of the Caspian terns, ring-billed gulls, herring gulls, double-crested cormorants or the North Pacific albatrosses I was allowed to study over six decades and believe humans will never learn to converse with birds directly. Yet, these magnificent creatures reveal insights into why climate change, invasive species and contaminants cause so many deleterious changes. Humans are so focused on their own welfare that learning the inflexible limits of natural processes are buried by our possessions and cultures. We are trapped in neoliberal cultures that endorse “I-ness” as the driving goal, leading us to ignore nature and the commonweal. We covet I-phones, I-books, I-pads, retirement funds, personal trainers, and wealth advisors in search of validation (Harari 2014). Caught up by material pursuits, the natural world is ignored - but Mother Nature bats last , a truth we ignore at great peril. We often assume her laws and whims are irrelevant until a natural disaster forces us to confront unbridled powers that do not credit humans as a unique species in control of anything. If we ignore processes like climate change, evolution, or degradation of clean air and water we descend into chaos and come to doubt we have a future. Great Lakes waterbirds are quiet sentinels of the changes that spring up in our wake, rather like the ‘rooster-tail’ behind a fast-moving boat and the wake that follows.
Understanding how the Great Lakes have changed by research on waterbirds is an interest I inherited from my father who banded thousands of colony-nesting waterbirds on the Great Lakes islands after 1929. He was one of a handful of adventurous men to devote personal resources to colonial waterbird banding between the two World Wars. Great Lake states and Ontario banders tagged waterbirds on remote Great Lakes islands beginning in 1922. They were a diverse lot - lawyer, chemist, medical doctor, brain surgeon, insurance broker, real estate agent, chemical engineer, hardware salesman, lighthouse keeper, conservation officer, university professor, plumber and day-laborer - with educations from the 8 th grade to MDs and Ph.Ds. They recorded waterbird migrations, considered bird survival, and kept records of waterbird colonies visited, quietly accumulating valuable baseline data. Later generations of academics and government scientists would access the records of these amateur natural historians who recorded what they observed to produce a more accurate understanding of the Great Lakes. This is their story told by one w