More migratory birds flocking to northern Alabama

I expect that this sort of thing is happening all over. We've had shifts of this sort. It's quite exciting for the birders - new birds showing up and all.

From The Birmingham News:

...Since the 1960s, the number of the birds in the reservoirs and refuges in northern Alabama have almost flip-flopped. Almost every species' numbers are either climbing steeply or dwindling.

And other birds are appearing for the first time. Pelicans, terns and gulls by the thousands now winter north of Birmingham.

"When I was a boy growing up in Decatur, a gull, a pelican - those were all seashore birds," said Keith Hudson, the state's nongame biologist for the northern half of Alabama.

Now, the one-time beach birds spend the winter in the reservoirs of the Tennessee River or at Decatur's Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge.

And they are joined by nearly every fish-eating bird or duck found in northern Alabama. Almost all are on the increase during the winter.

On the other end of the food chain, the numbers of tiny seed-eating sparrows also are soaring. The exception is the once-common house sparrow, which is in steep decline at Wheeler. Wildlife biologists don't know why.

Nor do they have any idea why robins have multiplied almost by 10. Or why an annual winter bird count at Wheeler finds that Eastern bluebirds have increased from an average of seven in the 1970s to 282 in the past decade.

But they have some educated guesses: It's likely that recent warm winters have trained some migrating birds to stop in Alabama instead of Florida and the Gulf Coast, experts agree.

And there's no question left in birding circles that at least some water birds are rebounding after the United States' 1972 ban of DDT, which entered the food chain through fish.

Nationally, populations of birds known to be most affected by DDT are now fully recovered.

Both the bald eagle and the brown pelican have been removed from the Endangered Species List in the South after they were almost exterminated by DDT....

Birds such as red-cockaded woodpeckers and Bachman's sparrows, which are reliant on one type of pine forest all year, may be the global losers among birds.

"It's going to be harder for some of these birds to adapt than others," Duncan said. "Especially the ones that have very specific habitats, if their habitats are being hammered."