Annual Paper Session

Today a sibling and I attended the annual Minnesota Ornithological Union annual paper session at the Bell Museum at the University of Minnesota.  I'm not used to sitting and listening for hours on end but the topics were fascinating.  The first two talks were on loons.  Loons.  I thought they were nice birds.  Loons are the state bird.  Loons make lonely calls in the middle of the night and adorn license plates.  Turns out loons are a warrior bird.  People think they have the same pair of loons for year after year at their lake.  Loon banding projects prove this is not the case.  Loons drive others off the lake and take over as the mate and parent of the chicks.  Male and female loons do this.  Loons fight.  We saw video of female loons fighting each other and male loons fighting each other.  I would not want to get whacked repeatedly by a loon wing.  Male loons will swim under the resident male loon and drive their beak into the breast of the unsuspecting loon, puncturing the organs and causing a fatal stab wound. Another topic was the scientific classification system.  Big changes are ahead for us.  With the advent of DNA analysis they are finding that birds we thought were on the same branch of the bird family are not.  In the next ten years many birds will be reclassified and we will learn about the "next new truth."  This applies not only to birds but all animals and plants.  You might want to hold off buying any more field guides until the year 2020.  We listened to talks about the two major causes of songbird death - unrestrained cats and windows.  We listened to talks about peregrine falcons and purple martins.  I had a great day learning, listening, and reconnecting with other birders.  I learned that in the United States, one of four people enjoy birding.  In Minnesota, one out of three people proclaim their love of birds.  It's funny how conversations go when the subject turns to birds.  After the session we went out visiting.  I found out that my father was nicknamed "slough pumper" on his baseball team.  We asked what a slough pumper was and why he was given that nickname, we were told a slough pumper is a shypoke and it has long legs.  True, he has long longs but what is a shypoke?  Turns out both a shypoke and a slough pumper are birds, dark in color, that live in the swamp and make a lot of noise.  I looked up both words.  Shypoke is a term that applies to several kinds of egret.  A slough pumper is a bittern (see photo), a small egret that makes a mechanical call that sounds like "pump-er-lunk."  I spent the whole day learning about birds and what I came away with is there is so much more I want to learn about birds.