Best Bird Books of 2020 on the American Birding Podcast

It’s finally December of 2020, the month of annual superlatives. It was a pretty interesting year for bird books and we convened the Birding Book Club crew to talk about them. 10,000 Birds book review columnist Donna Schulman and Birding media review editor Frank Izaguirre join host Nate Swick to run down their favorites for 2020, including new field guides, books on bird behavior, and lots of fantastic narrative prose in both memoire and essay form.

Thanks to Field Guides for sponsoring this episode. Please check out their new webseries, Out Birding with Field Guides. 

Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Google Play. You can also find every episode of the American Birding Podcast on our podcast homepage.

What of the Pygmy Nuthatch on How to Know the Birds

The romance of the Rocky Mountain foothills is enhanced, no doubt, by the energetic piping of Pygmy Nuthatches. We don't think of this widespread and familiar species as one that is under threat, but it is, by the inexorable and anthropogenic menace of climate change. 

No more beating around the bush. Pygmy Nuthatches are in trouble. I first got a sense of that when I lived in Nevada in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and came to appreciate that these “pack nuthatches” are absent from the vast majority of the Silver State’s 300+ mountain ranges. Every single one of Nevada’s mountains has conifers, but only a few have “yellow pines” (basically, Jeffrey pines, P. jeffreyi, and ponderosa pines, although I note in passing that Pinus taxonomy makes gull taxonomy look like a cakewalk). No yellow pines → no Pygmy Nuthatches.

Here in Colorado, one takes the ponderosa pine for granted. When you gaze out toward the foothills from I-25 or U. S. 287, the foothills get that dark coloration from their carpet of pondos. And when you gaze down from the continental divide, the forest below is chiefly P. ponderosa.

Birding editor Ted Floyd weighs in on the plight on the Pygmy Nuthatches in his latest How to Know the Birds. 

Ted Floyd's How to Know the Birds is a biweekly column on the ABA website. You can find this and any other of Ted's essays at our How to Know the Birds hub. 

Birds Surviving "The Most Challenging Season"

"The concise summaries of complex interactions among species make for interesting reading. Growing pressure on shorebirds from expanding Peregrine Falcon populations has been well documented, but how is it that an increasing number of Bald Eagles also affects shorebirds, which are easily agile enough to avoid a more lumbering predator? Pasquier summarizes research from near Vancouver, British Columbia, where over one-third of Dunlins captured by Peregrine Falcons were stolen by Bald Eagles or other larger raptors, forcing the falcons to go on the hunt again to get their own meals. Meanwhile, Dunlins in this area have taken to "aerial roosting", taking flight one or two hours before high tide and returning up to four hours later." 

December Birding book reviews are out and Marcel Gahbauer of Ottawa, Ontario, reviews a book on a topic close to his own heart, Roger F. Pasquier's Birds in Winter.

What's This Bird LIVE Coming This Friday!

Looking for an opportunity to talk birds in our pandemic reality? ABA staffers Greg Neise and Nate Swick host a biweekly LIVE bird identification show birders can find on all of the ABA's social media platforms every other Friday afternoon. The next one is scheduled for December 18 at 1:30 PM ET. 

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