hill outside of Madison, Wisconsin, Orin Libby counted 3600 calls from night-migrating birds in five hours of listening (Libby 1899). This count is the first published record of an attempt to quantify the night flight call phenomenon of North America’s avifauna. Native people in Wisconsin likely heard nocturnal bird migrations during the previous 10,000 years. In the 50 years after Libby’s report, only two other counts of nocturnal flight calls were reported, those by Paul Howes (1914) counting Swainson’s Thrushes [then called Olivebacked Thrush] in Connecticut and the extraordinary 15-year study by Stanley Ball (1952) counting migrating thrushes in eastern Quebec. Ball’s work was the first to use nocturnal flight call monitoring to produce data on the migration timing of species in a region. Beginning in the 1950s, regular nocturnal flight call counts were reported from regions throughout eastern North America in the Audubon Field Notes. Most of the reports were tallies of call totals or of estimated numbers of Catharus thrushes passing over during a portion of an evening. One outstanding effort is the long-term work by Ron Weir who has been counting thrush calls in fall migration near Kingston, Ontario for more than 25 years (see American Birds, Lake Ontario region, fall reports). In the 1950s technological developments enabled the first audio recording of nocturnal bird migration. Bill Gunn recorded some short periods of calling from the top of the Imperial Oil building in downtown Toronto in late September 1957. At about the same time, the team of Richard Graber and Bill Cochran were beginning their pioneering nocturnal flight call study in central Illinois (Fig.1). Some recordings of both of these efforts are archived at the Macauley Library of Natural Sounds at Cornell University. Graber and Cochran were associated with the Illinois Natural History Survey. Cochran was an electrical engineer and designed the recording equipment. He was able to configure a
Despite recent critiques of community conservation projects, such projects managed by community groups are the future of conservation. Critics are confusing large Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDP) with our smaller scale successful community conservation projects. Part of the controversy depends on scale of size and budget of projects. Other successful characteristics that separate the smaller successful projects are that they are holistic, they fully integrate economics without stressing them, and they see rural people as the solution, hence as potential conservationists. Additionally, these projects create models for regional influence and focus on empowering community groups to function equally with governments or non-government organizations (NGOs) as co-managers of protected areas. While the projects I discuss often have a focal animal, in reality, they look at habitat and full ecosystems as much as possible. Thus, although birds may not be the overt focus, they are a major part of the vertebrate populations to be conserved. Well over 60 Wisconsin bird species, especially warblers, are being protected by communities in Belize and Wisconsin (see Tables 1 and 2).
I am pleased to have the opportunity to serve as President of the Canadian Society for Electrical and Computer Engineering. It is an honour and in my view important that Canada, like other developed countries, have a flourishing national electrical and computer engineering society.
