Is your friend or family member an ornithologist, a conservationist, or a general appreciator of the environment? How about a Baltimore Orioles or Philadelphia Eagles fan? Stanford Cardinal? Consider adopting a bird through Audubon’s gift program! (Orioles, eagles, and cardinals among a number of other birds are all available for adoption). For $30, through the adoption program, the recipient will be given a personalized card showcasing their adoption, a year subscription the Audubon magazine, and a year of membership to the National Audubon Society. Your donation will support Audubon’s programs aimed toward conserving and restoring natural ecosystems for birds and other wildlife.
The adoption program contributes to Audubon’s efforts to protect flight paths that birds use during migration, or flyways, and other important bird areas around the world. Through Audubon’s work with local chapters, conservation partners, and citizen scientists, the organization has identified over 370 million acres (more land than California and Texas combined) in the U.S. for active monitoring and restoration to ensure birds safe passage and healthy breeding. A case in point is the Atlantic flyway, which is home to roughly 150 important bird areas prioritized by Audubon. Spanning diverse ecosystems all the way from Maine to Florida, the Atlantic flyway is a passageway for over 500 different species, totaling millions of individual birds. One of the main challenges posed to the birds that depend on this flyway for habitation and migration is the populous nature of the region – although the Atlantic flyway covers a tenth of the nation’s landmass, it is inhabited by one third of the nation’s people. Urban development, climate change and overfishing have adversely affected the avian community and have rendered 40% of the resident species in need of conservation. Sadly, some species’ populations have decreased by as much as half in recent years.
This year, you can choose to adopt the Atlantic puffin, a protected bird in the Atlantic flyway and a great choice for the holiday season. Donations through the adoption program have supported Project Puffin which has restored puffins to their historic nesting habitat in the Gulf of Maine. In 1973, just two small colonies of puffins existed in Maine. Over years of transplanting puffins from colonies in Newfoundland and extensive monitoring and habitat sustainment by ecologists, there are now over 1,000 puffins in Maine. These birds, with their unique beak coloring, can fly up to 55 miles per hour (which is faster than a racehorse can run) and can dive 200 feet underwater. Puffins usually mate for life and return to their home burrowing grounds to breed, a critical factor for the success of the repopulation of the Maine site. In spite of the project’s productive results, more pufflings and adult birds died last year than in all previous years of the the project. Biologists suspect that recent increases in temperature of the Atlantic Ocean have contributed to changing fish populations that puffins prey on, affecting the viability of this Atlantic flyway resident. Audubon employs a combination of supporting science and education and habitat conservation to aid in the recovery of the Atlantic puffin population.
Adopt a bird this year and check out Audubon for more information on their conservation programs.
Image: Wikipedia
Sheetal Modi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University where she studies how bacteria develop and spread antibiotic resistance. She has a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, and when she’s not growing her bacterial cultures (and repeatedly killing them), she enjoys science communication and being outside.