You enjoy watching birds, right? And you like a challenge?
Here’s a fun way to combine both: Gather up a few friends and go birding sometime during the Memorial Day weekend (May 25-27). But — and here’s the challenging part — you’ll only be counting female birds.
That’s right, doing a Female Bird Day means no bright-red male cardinals, no green-headed mallards, no blue-blue bluebirds. You’ll be looking for the usually more subtle, less obvious members of each species, and I guarantee this will make it harder to get a high count for your time in the field (or at the window).
What’s the point? Realization is growing that female birds are “the most overlooked birds in North America,” as one researcher puts it. To spotlight female birds, a group of staffers at the national Audubon Society created the Galbatross Project (gal + albatross). Anyone can join this fun event with a serious side: It’s designed to help point out the fact that ornithology has been focused on male birds, leaving out females almost entirely. This bias shows up in field research, bird conservation, field guides, bird watching, bird photography, the whole gamut.
Advocating for female birds isn’t some kind of misapplication of feminism to the bird world. Instead, it recognizes that we know very little about female birds’ lifestyles and specific needs, and such ignorance can have profound effects on a species, especially in the conservation area. Example: Golden-winged warbler females tend to live at lower elevations during winter than males do. If field researchers study only birds at higher elevations, they may conclude that the species is doing fine. But in fact, the areas females inhabit tend to be heavily logged, leading to a decline in the female population, and should be factored into conservation plans for this at-risk species.
“Female birds are different in many ways, including biologically, from their male counterparts,” notes Joanna Wu, a researcher at UCLA., one of the original Galbatrosses. “Our primary goal is to increase awareness of female birds anytime of the year.”
Another example: It used to be widely accepted that only male birds sing, until several women researchers began to notice female birds singing, too. Many of the female songsters live in tropical zones, but some are right in our own backyards, like female cardinals. Field researchers are now listening more carefully, and revising their math: Thinking that all singing birds were males, scientists would double the number of birds singing, assuming that unseen females were nearby. But those two singers could be a male and a female, making the field count too high.
So gather up some friends and go out looking for birds wherever you find yourself on the start-of-summer holiday. You could count only female birds just for the fun of it, or as a fun way to help boost bird science.
