mockingbird markets, museum specimens, and important women
Cool stuff I learned about birds and conservation this week:
mockingbird market
Northern Mockingbirds are ubiquitous in my area. I recently learned that males continually add songs to their catalog throughout their life, they can learn up to 200 songs, and that they were actually hunted/collected and sold as cage birds in the 1800s for as much as $50 a bird. $50 in the 1800s was a ton of money. The biggest markets were in New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. Sadly, the mockingbird market got so big that they were almost eradicated from the east coast entirely. Not sure how that market ended, but luckily they're of low conservation concern right now, so they're doing well.
verdins
Verdins are the only species in their genus, which makes them really amazing to see but also really important to protect. Sadly, their populations are declining.
A cool fact about them is that they build weird spherical nests year-round for both breeding and roosting. Their winter roosting nests are insulated so they can conserve up to 50% of their energy needed to stay warm, and their summer roosting nests have the opening facing toward where the prominent winds come from, to aid with cooling. They really only live in the desert southwest and Mexico, so this makes sense. It's just awesome that animals figure out how to optimally survive in harsh environments like this without the luxuries of air conditioners or heaters.
museum specimens
Apparently museums have 3 main ways of preparing specimens (which are dead birds preserved for scientific research):
- round skin: they remove a bird's innards but preserve the external anatomy like the body, bills, beaks, wings, tails, etc. As long as they're kept away from moisture or pests, these specimens can last indefinitely for research
- wet specimens: they use formalin to harden a bird's tissue before storing it in a jar of alcohol. This preserves internal organs for research
- skeletons: they remove everything except the skeleton. For a detailed cleaning, they put the remaining carcass in a box with dermestid beetles that eat any leftover tissue
important women
By the late 1800s, tons of birds were being slaughtered for the women's fashion industry (feathered hats were very popular). Two elite women in Boston, Harriet Hemenway and Minna B. Hall, were already supporters of early bird conservation movements like the Audubon Society. They took it upon themselves to host fancy events with other elite women, encouraging them to stop buying hats that used bird feathers. Their efforts were successful--almost 1,000 Bostonian women joined their effort to boycott fashion with feathers, playing an integral part in the end of the "plume trade" (plumage being feathers).
They went on to found the Massachusetts Audubon Society, where women made up half of its officers and leaders.