Editors' Notebook

In this issue, we offer two informative pieces on one of our continent's most striking songbirds, Painted Bunting.The article by Sykes and Holzman on the species' breeding range in the East and the article by Mlodinow and Hamilton on its extralimital wandering together contribute much to our understanding of the bunting's status and distribution; a later paper on wintering distribution will complement these articles."Why offer such exhaustive descriptions, when we already have field guides' maps?" some might ask.There are many compelling reasons to pursue an increasingly refined understanding of where this species is found--and where it is absent.The most important is that, at least in the Southeast, Painted Bunting habitat is being lost to development at a rapid pace.As private lands are developed in the Southeast, the public areas described specifically as bunting habitat will almost certainly become the last refugia of the species in the East.For the conservation of the population, it is crucial that scientists and planners know where the birds are.(It is also useful information for birders who would like to see one.)The second paper tackles a trickier subject, the "vagrancy"of Painted Bunting.Working from an exhaustive table of extralimital reports of the species from every state that lacks a breeding population, along with Bermuda and eight Canadian provinces, the authors discover strong seasonal patterns in the reports and suggest possible causes for these patterns.What connects these papers, besides their topic?Take a look at the Acknowledgments and the many "in litt."and"pers.comm."references in them.These studies would hardly have been possible without the help of hundreds of knowledgeable, local observers, who supplied the writers with old records, current breeding areas, and documentation that form the core of the data, along with Breeding Bird Survey results and findings of other citizen-science initiatives.To understand where these buntings breed, and where they appear as vagrants (some of which stay to breed), thousands of eyes were needed.The core oJ people who made these papers possible consists, by and large, oJ the readers oJ this journal.The "Changing Seasons"essay brings this point home.Sullivan and Wood examine trends in abundance of several "common" species--particularly American Kestrel using the best available data from citizen-science initiatives.Ihey also look briefly at trends of vagrancy in two favorites, Cave Swallow and Red-throated Pipit.Their point, as directors of the new "eBird" project based at Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is straightforward: the status and distribution of our avi[auna are ever changing, never static.Where Ernest Choate could tally 25,000 kestrels in a day, at Cape May, modern hawkwatchers now fail to find that many in [our months of dawn-to-dusk census work.But Choate never knew a Cave Swallow there, a species that modern birders now find annually, sometimes by the dozens.What was once abundant is now far

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.