Yeah, I noticed that. I’ll talk to them about it but might be too late. But a lot of first-time users of iNat in NM are posting their bird mort records.
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I’m emailing the person who’s address is listed there, hopefully it can be updated. :/
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Not sure why some of these records aren’t being pulled into the SW Avian Mortality Project. Others get pulled in right away when you add the Dead annotation and it is IDed as a bird.
It is in the project https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&project_id=southwest-avian-mortality-project&user_id=vanessa626&verifiable=any
It just doesn’t show the project on the observation because the observer hasn’t joined the project.
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@bouteloua – Thanks, I didn’t realize that was how it worked.
I’m trying to reply to JeremyHussell. Do you think that the large methane plume over NM (and to a lesser degree much of the southwest) could contribute to the recent bird die-off, perhaps in combination with other airborne hydrocarbons and smoke?
Hello. I’m new to this app, site, and forum, so I’m not certain if I’m doing this correctly. Apologies if I’m not. I came here because of the avian mortality in the SW.
I’m in Tucson, AZ. I have an office here and three months ago, I mentioned to one of my staff members that I’d noticed a marked diminution in the number of birds around the office. She told me that she’d seen a dead sparrow and a dead mockingbird, within twenty feet of each other in our parking lot.
I was concerned that perhaps someone had been poisoning birds because of the high numbers of pigeons which had been in the area. This was before the fires in the northwest of course. Since then, I’ve noted an alarmingly marked drop off in almost all of the birds and oddly, the. Neighborhood cats as well. Again, I’d thought the same thing, and I reported my suspicions to the Humane Society.
My home is in the desert far from there, and during this time frame I’d also noted how still and quiet it had become in my neighborhood. I’d thought that it was due to the Covid shutdown keeping people indoors more, but I now realize that it was a progressive drop off in avian calls.
Last week, I saw two Gila Woodpecker pairs abandon their saguaro nests after they’d gone silent. Usually the chicks chirp when the adults approach with food, but that’d stopped, and I saw one pair examine their nest for some time without hearing any noise from the chicks. One adult even stuck its head into the nest and came back out with the bug that it’d had still in its beak. Now both pair are gone. It’s early AM, 76 degrees, and there should be a lot of bird activity here, but it’s dead silent outside.
I stood on my porch for 15 minutes, saw no fly overs of anything and heard exactly one call from what sounded to be a Cactus Wren maybe a 1/4 mile away.
One hummingbird (a regular to my yard) buzzed in to sample a flower and that was it. Nothing else.
I have not seen nor heard any quail whatsoever for weeks.
My house is quiet inside, with maybe just a computer cooling fan, the blowing of the AC, and the refrigerator cycling in and off; but when I stepped outside, it was even quieter out there. I have seen the occasional Mourning Dove fly by over In the last few days, but only one or two here and there, and their flying seems strained, made in shorter hops, and a little irregular. They also appear thin.
This is very disturbing.
I’m hoping that it is all just due to the exceptionally dry year we’ve had. We essential had almost nothing in the way of our usual monsoon rains. I’ve lived here since 1981 and I cannot recall a year this dry. My roof rain gauge is showing .04 inches for the month and only 7.68” since Jan 1st. There have been almost no bugs here, So maybe that’s a large part of why they’re starving, but I’m not so sure that that is it.
Please forgive the long post. I guess I had more to say than I’d thought.
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Welcome to the Forum, @DManos. Thanks for sharing.
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In short, no. Methane is non-toxic, and the concentrations in the methane plume are ~1.8 parts per million. It takes some amazingly sensitive sensors to detect it.
Without getting too far into the current news-cycle-fueled brouhaha over this, the main concern is that methane is an unusually good thermal insulator, so it contributes to climate change even in small concentrations. So, methane is present in the atmosphere at something like 1/225th the concentration of CO2, but it’s 120 times as good at trapping heat, and thus contributes about 120/225 ≈ 50% as much heat-trapping ability as CO2, or about 25% of all heat trapping done by atmospheric gasses. So there’s a chance to have a small but significant effect by reducing methane emissions from the oil fields, for a lot less effort than is necessary to reduce CO2 emissions enough to have the same effect.
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Just following up here. The U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center released a report that said the birds were all emaciated.
The center conducted numerous tests during analyses, ruling out contagious bacterial disease, contagious viral disease including avian influenza and Newcastle disease and parasites as cause of death, as well as finding no evidence of smoke poisoning or pesticide poisoning.
“The Department would like to thank many partners and the public who reported mortalities across New Mexico,” said Erin Duvuvuei, the Department’s avian biologist. “Hundreds of reports were received through email, phone calls and the iNaturalist app.” Reports declined by late September.
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I eventually found a paper with a list of known mass-mortality events from the 1800s up to ~2000. Table 1 in: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1474-919X.2007.00704.x
Thankfully, my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me and the event I remembered is in the list.
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@tiwane – Thanks for reopening the topic and posting this. I saw that news release the other day. Kudos to my coworkers and other individuals and agencies who did a thorough investigation of this event under difficult conditions amidst the current human health crisis.
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Interesting report, Thank you @tiwane for the link.
Does anyone know if this kind of emaciation could be the result of avoidance/confusion of the massive amount of smoke we were experiencing in the west of the US and Canada?
looks like @JeremyHussell answered this already :
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