Species editor
Marius Doyle is an ecologist who has spent fifteen years studying single species at depth. He edits Roost's Species section.
Beats
Endangered
On the dry prairies of central Florida, a subspecies that nearly disappeared in 2017 is being rebuilt one captive-bred release at a time, with results that are encouraging and not yet sufficient.
Citizen Science
Volunteer banders have placed leg bands on over 78 million North American birds since 1920. Marius Doyle reads from the lab's recovery records.
Migration
A small Mediterranean raptor breeds two months later than every other Western Palearctic falcon. The reason involves migrating songbirds and the wind on the Aegean.
Field Reports
From the easternmost rocks at 8:14 a.m., three jaeger species in ninety minutes and the lake birders who drove from St. Paul.
Species
In a stand of young jack pine in Crawford County, Michigan, on May 28, a male Kirtland's warbler sang from the same square metre of branch he had sung from the previous afternoon. The pine was eleven years old. In four more years, the bird would not return.
Habitat
Across the eastern United States, transmission corridors managed on a six-to-ten-year cutting cycle now hold some of the region's best remaining grassland and shrubland bird habitat. The utilities, mostly, did not plan for this.
Songs
The Northern mockingbird has been the subject of mimicry research for over a century, from Frank Chapman's 1916 census of borrowed phrases to David Gammon's recent work on song accuracy. Marius Doyle reads the record.
Citizen Science
After five years of fieldwork by 2,100 volunteers, the second Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas is in print. Marius Doyle reads it slowly.
Songs
Marius Doyle works through what the literature has measured about the hermit thrush's pitch intervals, which a 2014 study found to align suspiciously with the harmonic series, and what an ear in a Vermont wood actually hears.
Endangered
The last accepted sighting was in 1988. In April, a small group gathered in the South Carolina lowcountry to walk the canebrakes where the bird used to nest.
Migration
Two migrations, one continental, one hemispheric. The parallels are stranger than the differences.
Habitat
Across two summers in southern Pennsylvania, a small study compared nesting success in mowed pasture, abandoned pasture, and managed thicket. The thicket won by a margin no one disputes anymore.
Species
The bird stands in six inches of brackish water at Stone Harbor, New Jersey, indifferent to the joggers on the boardwalk. A hundred and twenty years ago, that posture would have killed it.