information on lead and wildlife, wind power and bird populations

Two important items:

Please help move us forward in 2009 in the effort to eliminate lead in hunting ammunition and fishing tackle. Lead continues to be threat to birds and other wildlife. Read an excellent editorial here.

Secondly, look for information from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in the coming weeks and months regarding wind power and assessing its effects on bird populations. Last evening I attended a presentation by Dr. Ken Rosenberg and Dr. Andrew Farnsworth, at a "Cornell on the Road" series. Along with a group of other ornithologists, they are meeting in southeastern Wisconsin over the next three days to discuss "State of the Art Technology for Predicting Broad-Scale Migration and Pinpointing Local Concentrations in Real Time". This meeting is intended to discuss the uses of acoustic monitoring, radar, other monitoring methods, weather data, correlations of radar with avian density and species identification, and how models can predict both movements and concentrations of birds. The meeting will produce a "draft consensus statement" with one stated goal being the planning of research that will help in quantifying risks to birds, among others - this information will be disseminated to the ornithological community and the public in the coming months.