Cooper Ornithological Society Research Articles

Seeing birds: Dr Casey Wood's (1856–1942) second career

In 1920, Casey Albert Wood (1856–1942), a prominent Canadian ophthalmologist and bibliophile, began what was essentially a second career as an amateur ornithologist and author. This paper examines the path Wood followed as he learned more about birds and developed a network of colleagues that aided his transition to a respected member of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU) and prolific author on ornithology. It also seeks to place Wood's ornithological writings within the contemporary scientific and popular literature on birds. After his retirement from medical practice in 1920, Wood and his wife Emma (née Shearer) (1859–1951) travelled extensively and Wood's ornithological observations were published in journals varying from scientific publications like the AOU's The Auk and the Cooper Ornithological Society's The Condor, to more popular magazines like the Audubon Society of the Pacific's The Gull. Wood's contributions often combined natural history observation with literary allusions and personal reminiscence. Towards the end of his second career, Wood turned to his bibliophile interests, publishing a catalogue of the McGill Library holdings in vertebrate zoology as well as a translation co-authored with his niece Florence Marjorie Fyfe (1892–1965) of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen's De arte venandi cum avibus. Wood was representative of an earlier generation of gentlemen ornithologists, eulogized in his obituary in The Auk as “probably the most broadly cultured and deeply learned of his generation in our Union”.

Honorary Lifetime Membership Award: Ellen D. Ketterson.

Honorary Lifetime Membership Award: Ellen D. Ketterson.

New Honorary Members of the Cooper Ornithological Society, 2016

New Honorary Members of the Cooper Ornithological Society, 2016

Report of the Eighty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society

Report of the Eighty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society

Report of the Eighty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society

Report of the Eighty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society

New Honorary Members of the Cooper Ornithological Society, 2015

New Honorary Members of the Cooper Ornithological Society, 2015

Ecology and conservation of avian insectivores of the rainforest understory: A pantropical perspective

Avian insectivores of the tropical rainforest understory (“understory insectivores”) are common, diverse, and often sensitive to disturbance of tropical forest, making them useful as sentinels of rainforest ecosystem change. At the 2013 joint American Ornithologists’ Union and Cooper Ornithological Society meeting in Chicago, USA, researchers convened a symposium to address the ecology and conservation of understory insectivores. This Special Issue of Biological Conservation is the result of that symposium: a collection of articles that unites our efforts to further understand and conserve understory insectivores. In this introductory paper, we review the diversity and ecology of understory insectivores, identify threats to the guild, discuss hypotheses on drivers of population declines, and make suggestions for future research. Deforestation and forest degradation are the immediate threats to this guild, with agricultural expansion (particularly oil palm plantations), urbanization, road expansion and logging leading the list. Although vulnerabilities of this guild are most evident in the Neotropics, there are few studies from Asia and fewer still from Africa—we recommend increased geographic coverage. If we are to understand the vulnerabilities of understory insectivores from a pantropical perspective, researchers should prioritize understanding the most serious threats (e.g., edge effects, deforestation, fragmentation, etc.) and standardize efforts to gauge understory insectivores’ response to these threats (e.g., via species richness, abundance, demographic metrics). A coordinated approach by researchers working in tropical rainforests across the globe can help us understand the ecology of understory insectivores and meaningfully apply conservation and management actions.

Report of the Eighty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society

Report of the Eighty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society

New Honorary Members of the Cooper Ornithological Society

New Honorary Members of the Cooper Ornithological Society

Your new resource for exciting research in applied ornithology

We are undergoing big changes at Condor. Most obviously, as you see before you (Figure 1), the journal has been renamed The Condor: Ornithological Applications. This name clearly states the area of ornithology we aim to cover. You may also be reading this Editorial as part of the first set of papers released online, in the first week of 2014. Our new publishing model will allow accepted papers to make their way into press without the delay of quarterly publishing. On the journal’s main web page you can see how we are working together with The Auk: Ornithological Advances. Simply put, both journals become more efficient and more valuable to the ornithological community by dividing subject matter but sharing editorial and production offices. Behind the scenes are a newly configured joint editorial office, a new manuscript tracking system, a new online publishing platform, and a new print house, all of which are shared with Auk. As an example of new services the combined editorial office can provide, we work with authors and university outreach departments to highlight significant papers. These changes mean little to the discipline if we can’t produce a quality product. We think the explicit subject matter focus makes The Condor: Ornithological Applications an attractive place to submit your paper. First and foremost, as an author you can be assured your paper will be reviewed by ornithologists who know both the birds and the applied context. An exciting innovation is the opportunity for double-blind review, at your discretion as an author. We hope you will consider this option when you submit your paper. Additionally, a subset of papers will be open access from the time they appear online, giving your work a chance to reach audiences removed from academic libraries. As a reader, you can be assured any results and recommendations we publish have been thoroughly vetted by ornithologists. Our first set of papers quickly reveals that we are publishing important information for conservation of birds. We’ve expanded the expertise of the editorial staff to stay on the cutting edge of applied ornithology. In particular, in addition to the Editor-in-Chief, we have two Editors with full authority to accept or reject papers. Jen Owen brings unique skills in avian disease research, and Paul Doherty is an expert on analytical techniques. Our review system moves to the Associate Editor (AE) system, much as has been used at The Auk for more than a decade, in which AEs solicit external reviews and recommend a decision to the Editor-in-Chief or Editors. With all these changes, I want also to offer a bit of history to remind the reader of the long tradition of the Cooper Ornithological Society’s publications. As Editorin-Chief, I’m humbled to follow in the footsteps of not just our excellent recent editors, but also those of Joseph FIGURE 1. New cover design of The Condor: Ornithological Applications. The first issue features a Kittlitz’s Murrelet (Brachyramphus brevirostris) with its prey of Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii). Photo credit: Milo Burcham

Online scientific publishing backed by 130 years of excellence

Ever since the time when I was a workstudy student, unwrapping posted copies of bird journals at Yale University’s William Roberston Coe Ornithology Library, I have always considered The Auk to be the primary journal for articles about broadly relevant advances in avian biology. More recently, when my students and colleagues from around the world ask me where to send their latest manuscript for publication, I have started to respond by recollecting the years 2002–2003, when I submitted and first published articles in The Auk. One of those papers was a conceptual review of the types of novel questions that evolutionary and behavioral biologists would be able to answer using new molecular technologies about brood parasitic birds (Hauber and Dearborn 2003). The other article was an experimental test of the impact of egg-capping by eggs of brood parasites on host hatching success (Hauber 2003); this project was based on hypotheses proposed and tested in Tinbergen’s classic paper on eggshell removal by Black-headed Gulls Chroicocephalus (Larus) ridibundus (Tinbergen et al. 1962). Why did I submit these two manuscripts initially to The Auk? Because in my assessment, those themes and studies represented novel contributions to fundamental aspects of the discipline of ornithology, and The Auk was the place to publish such contributions. This status has been confirmed most recently by our publication’s number 1 standing in the 2012 round of impact factor rankings in ornithology. So, why should you, readers and authors, continue to support and publish in our journal? It is because today, the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union starts a new phase of its 130-year-old history, with a title true to its tradition of excellence in ornithological research. The Auk: Ornithological Advances becomes a primarily online journal, with articles published in their final content, format, and pagination on our new Internet platform, as soon as the copyeditors and proofreaders have finished their work. Together with a fully online submission and editorial process, the new editorial flow should dramatically decrease the latency from submission to publication for authors, and provide new articles for the reader on a weekly basis. Publication will continue to be dependent on a rigorous peer-review process, aided by the team of two independent editors, and a board of enthusiastic associate editors, that includes more women than ever before, and draws upon a diversity of expertise and perspectives within ornithology. To follow demonstrated cases of reducing referee bias, we have also instituted an optional double-blind manuscript-handling system. We also welcome our revamped, and primarily online, sibling journal, published by the Cooper Ornithological Society, The Condor: Ornithological Applications. For articles that are better suited in content for the new Condor, we have established an in-house online transfer process, so that authors interested in having their research continue to be considered by our combined publication office will save time by avoiding the many steps of a brand new submission process. We have revised the chromatic scheme (see Figure 1), and standardized the fonts and formatting requirements of both journals to make the PDFs easier to read onscreen. Color photos and illustrations online are free of charge to authors, and page length is flexible. The printed issues are continuing to be published quarterly in 2014 (with grayscale figures), and delivered to members of the AOU and institutional subscribers who request them, with our new front cover sporting a representative photograph from the issue’s FIGURE 1. New cover design of The Auk: Ornithological Advances. The first issue features a Brown-headed Cowbird egg in a clutch of the Eastern Phoebe. Photo credit: Marie Read

Report of the Eighty-third Annual Meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society

Report of the Eighty-third Annual Meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society

Report of the Eighty-second Annual Meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society

Report of the Eighty-second Annual Meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society

Report of the Eighty-First Annual Meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society

Report of the Eighty-First Annual Meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society

The Role of Social Information in Avian Habitat Selection

The Condor, Vol. 112, Number 2, pages 222–224. ISSN 0010-5422, electronic ISSN 1938-5422.  2010 by The Cooper Ornithological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/cond.2010.100005 Habitat selection is arguably one of the most studied processes in avian ecology. Although instructive in many respects, early studies were generally limited to comparing the distribution of individuals in relation to some structural environmental variables (Mayr 1926, MacArthur et al. 1962, Hilden 1965). In an abrupt departure from this model, Lack (1933) argued that “psychological factors” were important and underappreciated components of habitat selection. The importance of this suggestion was not fully recognized until Wecker (1963) provided a tangible example and, especially, until after a theoretical interpretation of the behavioral factors guiding habitat selection was developed by Fretwell and Lucas (1970). Today, few would question that animal behavior and cognition are essential components of the habitat-selection process. Now that we better recognize that animals use diverse cues to choose habitats, an important challenge facing ecologists is to understand the nature of those cues as well as how and if they are transmitted among individuals. A major step toward understanding such social cues was made when Ward and Zahavi (1973) developed the information-center hypothesis, which posited that animals join colonies and roosts to obtain information from others about the location of resources. Valone (1989) extended this concept and illustrated how individuals cannot only use others to gain information on resource location but can also determine the value of a patch by gauging the relative success of others, which he termed “public information.” These influential studies were the first of many that implied information is, in itself, an important and diverse resource. Danchin et al. (2004) reviewed and clarified the types of social information available to animals and categorized that information into two main types: information provided intentionally (signals) and information provided inadvertently. According to Danchin et al. (2004), inadvertent social information can be further subdivided into location cues (i.e., an SPECIAL SECTION: SOCIAL INFORMATION AND AVIAN HABITAT SELECTION

Report of the Seventy-Eighth Annual Meeting of The Cooper Ornithological Society

Report of the Seventy-Eighth Annual Meeting of The Cooper Ornithological Society

POLITICS AND EXTINCTION ON A HAWAIIAN ISLAND: RESPONSE TO CONANT AND LEONARD

Department of Journalism and Media Studies, University of South Florida St. Petersburg, 140 7th Avenue S., FCT204, St. Petersburg, FL 33701-5016 hour.” this was my second interview with him, not my first. (the first had occurred earlier over the telephone. this one, not the later one, lasted about an hour.) Despite the limited usefulness of these two exchanges, I made a number of unsuccessful attempts over several years to set up additional interviews. the reviewers also claim that “by devoting an entire chapter to this topic, Walters suggests that disturbance by researchers contributed to the species’ decline more than other causes. this is completely disingenuous.” the reviewers’ misjudgment of my motive is evinced by the simple fact that I also devote a chapter (11) to the topic of ranching and devote more-or-less three full chapters (21, 22, and 23) to the deaths of released birds, which are other possible contributing factors to the ‘alalā’s decline. Given that I devote several chapters to other possible causes, the reviewers’ judgment that I was being “completely disingenuous” to have included one about possible researcher interference is unwarranted. In the book I state, “rare, glamorous, and still mysterious, with little having been published on its biology or behavior, by the late 1970s, the ‘alalā had become a golden topic for academic research. the bird’s continuing descent toward extinction only increased its allure” (Walters 2006:127). the reviewers attempt to refute this statement by claiming, “If this was a true statement, Hawai‘i should be swarming with ornithologists (and funding).” But this is a logical fallacy. Conant and Leonard’s claim would be true only if the ‘alalā were the same as the other endangered species to which they refer. It is not. (a comparable syllogism illustrates the flawed reasoning: “the low branches help to make the cherry tree fun to climb. But holly trees have low branches, and they aren’t fun to climb. therefore, cherry trees can’t be fun to climb either.”) Like the cherry tree, the ‘alalā has many special attributes in addition to its increasing rarity, glamour, and mystery that helped to increase the bird’s allure. The Condor 110(4):806–807  the Cooper Ornithological Society 2008

Ned K. Johnson, 1932–2003

Ned K. Johnson, for many years Curator of Birds at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, died on 11 June 2003. He had served as President of both the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU) and the Cooper Ornithological Society. He was America's foremost authority on the taxonomy and biogeography of the birds of western North America and his research and expertise extended from the field to the museum and into the molecular laboratory. Ned Johnson was born in Reno, Nevada, on 3 November 1932; he grew up in Reno and attended the University of Nevada, graduating in 1954. By that time he was already enamoured of birds and had begun publishing his natural history observations in journals such as Condor and the Great Basin Naturalist. He served with the US Army Medical Service in Germany from 1954 to 1956 and subsequently entered graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. For his doctoral research, Ned worked on determining species status in sibling species of New World tyrannid flycatchers in the difficult genus Empidonax. His was one of the first studies to involve tape recordings and playback experiments on the breeding grounds. Upon completion of his PhD, Ned was hired as a faculty member at the University of California and its associated Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Ned took up the path of his predecessors, Joseph Grinnell and Alden Miller, the latter his doctoral dissertation advisor. Like them, he felt a deep affection for the fauna, flora and landscapes of the western United States, and especially for those of the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin ranges. At the end of each academic year, he would pack up his truck and spend much of the summer collecting specimens at localities carefully chosen to elucidate taxonomic or biogeographical problems. Ned was also an avid fly fisherman, and so the summers in the mountains gave him the opportunity to pursue this pastime. Ned continued studies of Empidonax and other tyrannid flycatchers throughout his career. More generally, however, he was interested in taxa that were morphologically or vocally differentiated across the western US. He was never a prisoner of the past; as new techniques were developed and shown to be useful, Ned adopted them. Thus, his second monograph on Empidonax in 1980 included multivariate morphometric analyses, a computer-based technique that had not been available at the time of his PhD dissertation. Allozyme studies of intraspecific variation became feasible at about this same time, and Ned incorporated them into his research. This led to the inclusion of liquid nitrogen dewars on his field trips. We both remember his stories of misadventures in South America with authorities confronted with ‘smoking’ nitrogen tanks for the first time. By 1990, mitochondrial DNA studies became feasible and Ned pursued this research for all his favourite groups. Incorporation of molecular techniques led to an interest in higher level systematics, something he had not shown much interest in beforehand. In all these studies Ned made lasting contributions; our knowledge of variation and speciation of the avifauna of western North America was profoundly affected by his unflagging and technologically evolving attention. For his research, Ned was awarded the AOU's Brewster Medal, the highest honour that the society can bestow. In addition to his research, Ned was very active in academic ornithology at local, national and international levels. He taught the undergraduate ornithology course at UC Berkeley throughout his tenure and earned the affection of students with local field trips; in the spring, for example, he required his natural history class to meet before first light at Tilden Park in the Berkeley Hills to experience the dawn chorus. Although Ned did not take on large numbers of graduate students, many of those who received their degrees under his guidance also worked on problems in speciation and geographical variation in birds and subsequently went on to occupy major academic and museum positions. Ned took on many leadership roles in American ornithology in addition to serving terms as President of its two major professional organizations. For three decades he was an active force in the AOU's Committee on Classification and Nomenclature – the arbiters of the official Checklist of North American birds. He enjoyed travelling to the International Ornithological Congresses every four years and served as a permanent member of the International Ornithological Committee. At meetings he was gregarious and especially complimentary to students and beginning ornithologists; consequently, his friendships extended to every generation of active researchers. Ned was an outstanding figure in twentieth century North American ornithology. His legacy includes a coterie of well-respected students, a series of classic papers, and a much-revised understanding of the biogeography and species status of western North American birds.

Evolution, Ecology, Conservation and Management of Hawaiian Birds: a Vanishing Avifauna

This volume from the Cooper Ornithological Society is the 22nd instalment in the Studies in Avian Biology series, which is dedicated to ornithological papers of too great a length for publication in The Condor journal. Evolution, Ecology and Conservation Biology are themselves very separate streams, each encompassing a diverse spectrum of application. However, they are brought together here, in a synthesis addressing an appalling record of extinction in the endemic birds of the Hawaiian Islands, which as a group, are among the world leaders in their tally of historically extinct and currently endangered bird species (King 1985).

Announcement of a New Award from the Cooper Ornithological Society

Announcement of a New Award from the Cooper Ornithological Society