The latest issue of Birdscope, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, focuses on cities and birds. The cover article posed the issue in a way I hadn’t thought of before, but which makes perfect sense: the more we humans can live happily in cities (the editors don’t develop that thought, which merits a long pause), “the less pressure there will be to further develop and fragment the countryside.”

While access to the entire issue is restricted to members of the lab, they do have a web-accessible online FAQ about urban birds. The front page of the article is worth quoting extensively, however:

Imagine a Scarlet Tanager setting out on his long journey from Minnesota to Peru. What cities might he pass through? … Quality habitat both where birds breed and where they spend winters is critical to their survival. Equally critical are sage pathways and resting places along their migratory routes.

Protecting the urban environment is vital for resident and migrant birds as well as for human city dwellers. As the human population swells, the more people are happily concentrated in major cities, the less pressure there will be to further develop and fragment the countryside.

In the rest of the newsletter, there are articles on

• how urban stress affects birds (our own Florida Scrub-Jay is one example they cite)
• how songbirds make themselves heard above city noise
• how tropical urbanization affects birds
• bird migration in Manhattan
• ten ways to help birds in cities (1. Make your windows bird-safe; 2. keep lights out at night (works for our sea turtles, too!); etc.)

I encourage you to join the lab and receive access to the complete newsletter; it’s always an interesting read. (Previous issues are available online in what looks their entirety; the current issue has only a few articles on the web.)