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Burton and Croxall, eds.: A Field Guide to the Wildlife of South Georgia

A Field Guide to the Wildlife of South Georgia

edited by Robert Burton and John Croxall

Princeton University Press, 2012

200 pages, $24.95–softcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books #13701

A scant dozen years after its foundation at the turn of this century, WildGuides is a small and active non-profit publisher producing natural history guides covering Britain and the world. Like such other exciting European ventures as the wonderful Crossbill Guides, WildGuides had gone largely unnoticed in America, but that has changed: Earlier this year, the imprint was acquired by Princeton University Press, which now makes available North American editions of all of the WildGuides titles, including this newest, produced for the South Georgia Heritage Trust, whose conservation efforts are supported directly by the proceeds from this book.

“Cold, cloudy, wet, and windy”—the authors of this guide are never less than honest—South Georgia lies nearly a thousand miles east and south of the Falklands. Its starkly beautiful landscape of snowy mountains and spectacularly abundant wildlife makes it the most popular of the subantarctic islands for visiting birders and tourists, attracted by the hordes of breeding penguins and pinnipeds.

Impressive as the wildlife spectacle remains today, South Georgia is far from pristine. Human exploitation of the island’s seals for blubber and fur began just a decade after Cook first landed here, and the next century and a quarter saw the near extinction of the fur seal, a species that has happily rebounded. The great whales, too, were taken in almost unimaginable numbers, as those of us who first learned about South Georgia from Robert Cushman Murphy’s Logbook for Grace will recall. And the region’s seabirds are in serious decline, threatened by longline fishing and introduced predators. The South Georgia Heritage Trust’s commitment to habitat restoration includes the most extensive rat eradication program in history: Phase I of that program, concluded in March 2011, left the areas around King Edward Point and Grytviken rat-free for the first time in 200 years, and the goal is to eradicate introduced rodents from the entire island by 2015, eliminating, it is hoped, what has become serious predation on the eggs and young of the island’s birds.

Today’s visitors are unlikely to notice these problems, their attention drawn instead by what is still the island’s rich abundance of wildlife. With this guide in hand, the birder or interested tourist will be able to identify nearly every plant and animal she encounters.

As the most conspicuous and, for many of us, the most sought-after organisms on the island, the birds and mammals occupy 90 of the book’s 200 pages. Each species is illustrated by at least one photograph, facing a prose account that covers distribution, identification, voice, and behavior. No fewer than seven plumage stages are shown for the Wandering Albatross, and a taxonomic note informs us that the breeding bird of South Georgia is the Snowy Albatross, Diomedea [exulans] exulans = “chionoptera”. Rare, unusual, or especially appealing species are also accorded short illustrated essays, treating, for example, the breeding cycle of the King Penguin or territorial behavior in the Antarctic fur seal.

Birders who look beyond the spectacle of the island’s seagoing animal life may be surprised by how few non-seabirds South Georgia can claim. Two waterfowl species, the South Georgia Pintail and the Speckled Teal, are resident, as are some of the breeding Snowy Sheathbills; the endemic South Georgia Pipit, a frequent victim of introduced rats, is the island’s only breeding passerine.    

South Georgia’s small size, remoteness, and harsh climate make it possible for the guide to go beyond coverage of the island’s conspicuous “macrofauna.” A dozen insects, including six beetles and six flies, are described and depicted, as are a springtail, a spider, a bird tick, two earthworms, a snail, and the largest free-living copepod species in the world. These are the invertebrates most likely to be observed by the non-specialist, though the island hosts another 200 or so species, among them more than 70 mites and ticks.  

Plants, too, including 25 native herbaceous angiosperm species and 16 ferns and club mosses, are treated, as are the island’s commonest or most conspicuous liverworts, lichens, algae, and fungi.

Such breadth of coverage makes of this book a true guide to wildlife. Birders so fortunate as to visit South Georgia will, naturally, also pack such essential and more detailed identification resources as Steve Howell’s Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels, but this guide will open the eyes of even the most single-minded fan of the feathered to the richness and complexity of this most spectacular of the subantarctic islands.  

Rick Wright

Bloomfield, New Jersey

rwright@aba.org

Spring Migration at Perk's National Forest

Via Birdchick:

A fair few of birders in the eastern half of the continent have their attentions on the Great Lakes region for the Greatest Week in American Birding Festival going on over the next few days in northern Ohio.  The draws for this particular event are the northbound migrants stacking up on the south shore of Lake Erie before making the perilous multi-hour water crossing into Canada. 

The spectacle, thousands upons thousands of individual birds - not to mention birders -  in one relatively confined patch of habitat, is one of the most incredible birding experiences in North America, and a testament to the importance of stopover habitat on both the American and Canadian sides of the lakes.  But our knowledge of bird migration over these bodies of water is relatively recent, and dependent in good part to those who don't necessarily fit the birder/ornithologist mold. 

Take, for instance, the remarkable story of Captain J.P. “Perk” Perkins, a ferry captain and birdwatcher who plied the Great Lakes between Erie, Pennsylvania, and Duluth, Minnesota, and whose story is related in a blog post from the Lake Superior Journal:

An avid birder, Perk Perkins decided not to let his career interfere with viewing birds. From the early 1930s through the early 1970s, Perk created his own on-deck forests, setting up a little green oasis on whichever Pittsburgh Steamship Division vessel he was assigned by the U.S. Steel Corporation.

His floating forest amused his shipmates, who called it “Perk’s National Forest.”

Perk’s forest habitat changed depending on available trees and shrubs. He’d buy balled and burlapped trees from landscapers before he left a port and arrange them in bushel baskets on deck. Birdseed and a viewing bench completed the waterborne landscape. 

Captain Perkins and his "forest", Photo (c) Sparky Stensaas Collection

Perkins identified 17 distinct migration corridors over lakes Superior, Huron, Michigan and Erie, recording more than 200 species using the flyways. And his reports dispelled the commonly held notion that birds crossing the Great Lakes were blown by weather and proved that trans-lake migration was a real and substantial occurrence.  And on top of that, he was an amateur filmmaker whose footage of rarely seen canopy species feeding and resting at close range on his boat was revolutionary for the time.

Captain Perkin's "forest" attracted thousands of exhausted migrants stopping for a rest while crossing the Great Lakes, and a great deal of what we know about migration in the area comes from his observations, which are nothing short of amazing. An excerpt:

“One of the most unforgettable occurred on August 20, 1961. … We were sailing eastward from Devils Island in the Apostle group. The fog had changed to a misty drizzle. When I aimed the searchlight upward, the beam revealed heavy flights of passing birds. … At times there were so many on the bridge deck that the lookout had to be careful not to step on them. …

“Although navigation of the ship required most of my attention, occasionally the watchman would pick up a bird and hold it up to the open front window where I would identify it by flashlight. … Most of the birds were the small empidonax flycatchers - myriads of them. … The second most abundant group were red-eyed vireos. These also had the heaviest fatality rate. There were other species too: downy woodpeckers, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, ruby-crowned kinglets, 13 species of warblers and chipping sparrows and song sparrows. The massive wave continued without let up until 3 a.m. Then it started to subside; possibly our ship was leaving the flyway. … There is no way to estimate the number of birds which crossed Lake Superior that night, but it must have been in the millions.”

This is all second nature now, of course.  But it's amazing how far we've come in our understanding, and how much the actions of regular birders helped us get there.  Keep it in mind as you watch those birds take off over the water for parts north!

Gooddie, The Jewel Hunter

“[M]oments of random joy…days of unforeseen despair…. No matter how skillful you become, no matter how honed your technique, it’s all so uncertain.”

Words that will resonate with any birder, but they apply with special urgency to Chris Gooddie’s year chasing all the world’s pittas across Asia, Africa, Australia, and the islands of the South Pacific. Gooddie succeeded, tallying all 32 then-recognized species, along the way surviving illness, injury, sun bears, and snakes. In the course of eleven months, he traveled well over 100,000 miles—most of it by plane—and spent well over $50,000.

Why?

To start with, pittas are, as I’m assured by those fortunate enough to have seen them, amazingly beautiful; it’s no accident that the romance forming the subplot of Sean Dooley’s Big Twitch is with the “girl with rainbow pitta eyes.” It was an encounter with a feathered pitta that convinced Chris Gooddie of the emptiness of a conventionally successful life, and it was his awareness of the sad state of many pittas’ populations that persuaded him to turn his back on that life in order to see them all while they were still more or less around.

Gooddie’s twenty chapters are for the most part straightforwardly chronological, each devoted to one of the major destinations he visited in his quest. The result is a series of adventure tales, “good reads” all, guaranteed to whet the reader’s appetite for exotic locales and their birds. The color photos illustrating the accounts are unfailingly evocative, even—or perhaps especially—the poor-quality images of some of the most elusive pitta species. Not a few of Gooddie’s photos are the first ever published of the species depicted.

Still, though, the question nags.

Why?

The author’s efforts on behalf of pitta conservation began well before he undertook his pitta year, and the book repeatedly points out that the habitats of some of the rarest species survive only because of the income provided by visiting birders to local guides and local communities: if a pair of scrubfowl is worth $3 dead and ten times that much per day alive, plain old self-interest should keep the birds crowing at the forest edge.

That’s a hopeful view, and one that seems to have been borne out in Gooddie’s experiences during his pitta year. I’m skeptical, though, that the simple “trickle-down” model really works for birding tourism on the whole. Too often, natural history travel is touted as ecotourism, when in fact the profit accrues to western tour operators and large landowners, consolidating rather than correcting unjust social circumstances. Let’s hope that future “jewel hunters” follow Gooddie’s lead in promoting the preservation of imperiled forests and the threatened birds that need them.