A Century of Observing Great Lakes Waterbirds: Insights Gained by Four Generations of Bird Banders

By James P. Ludwig Ph.D

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669870739

James P. Ludwig Ph.D

James P. Ludwig was born in Port Huron, Michigan in 1941 and is a dual Canadian- American citizen. He earned a Ph.D at the University of Michigan in 1968 and published 52 peer-reviewed articles on chemical contamination and the ecology of the Great Lakes between 1961 and 2013, focused on colonial waterbirds. He collaborated with many government and academic scientists from both nations for over 40 years and watched the inexorable deterioration the Great Lakes under neoliberal governments of both nations. He continues to monitor changes in Great Lakes’ bird populations and their ecology, relating these environmental changes to public policy during his retirement years.

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Copyright © 2023 by James P. Ludwig Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 03/23/2023

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1 Learning the languages of Great Lakes waterbirds.

Chapter 2 The Importance of Bellow Island, Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan.

Chapter 3 Great Lakes Waterbird Population Explosions after World War II.

Chapter 4 Three distinctly different ecological regimes in the last century.

Chapter 5 Understanding the population dynamics of waterbirds.

Chapter 6 Important research and management questions for Great Lakes ecology: The critical roles of scientists and managers of Great Lakes resources.

Chapter 7 Midway’s albatrosses.

Chapter 8 Change with the Covid-19 pandemic: Enduring effects of Great Lakes waterbird epizootics.

Chapter 9 Concluding thoughts – Speculations on possible futures.

Literature Cited

Appendices: Historic letters of interest to waterbird ecologists found in Claude C. Ludwig’s papers.

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PREFACE

Many families have unique passions others may regard as strange, but these interests may signal a family engaged in something for the common good even if others have no interest. People who study birds include many Audubon Society members who observe and accumulate lists of wild birds seen, technical researchers and a few who band birds to generate data on bird populations, their migrations and survival rates. The Ludwigs were bird banders. This book recounts nearly a century (1927 – 2023) of the Ludwig family bird studies, their banding passions and the useful data produced about waterbirds of the Great Lakes and albatrosses of Midway Island in the North Pacific Ocean. Analyses of data collected by many ornithologists show waterbirds respond to changing ecosystems as accurately and usually more quickly than well-trained scientists. Waterbirds reflected many changes of the last century and almost always long before humans measured how and theorized why ecosystems changed. Because waterbirds extract all they need from where they live, they must adjust to changes imposed on their ecosystems or die. Their numbers, body condition and many other responses by these populations reflect change as it happens while scientists remain in warm homes often resorting to computer models and theorizing to explain what happened and speculating about why. Waterbirds do not create models, theories or hypothesize effects; instead, they document change by the responses of their populations. After more than six decades of work on Great Lakes waterbirds I have come to believe there is wisdom in considering what waterbirds tell us by simply accessing the information embedded in those responses.

In 2016 I came upon three long-stored boxes of family documents and letters accumulated by my father and grandfather between 1921 and 1996. These papers were stored for decades and finally opened fourteen years after dad’s death when I had time to read them during my own retirement. These records held historic data, two unpublished manuscripts, the text of a 1933 speech to the University of Michigan’s bird club recounting dad’s earliest Great Lakes bandings of common terns herring gulls, ring-billed gulls and Caspian terns, letters between many banders, agency staff and even accounts of the military service in the South Pacific during WWII. I have opted to publish the most salient of those records to document how a group of obscure amateur naturalists compiled data and collected specimens for museums between 1922 and 1950 when the banding Great Lakes waterbirds was the hobby of a few eccentrics. Most modern agencies that now manage the Great Lakes did not exist in either the United States or Canada until the environmental activism in the 1960s and Earth Day in 1970 provided the political will to create them. Images of many original letters between these amateur biologists, agencies and legendary biologists including Frederick C. Lincoln are included. The roots of the US federal wildlife refuges in the upper three lakes, an early enforcement action taken under the 1918 North American Migratory Bird Treaty and the role of the Inland Bird Banding Association that linked these amateur biologists in the common cause to band waterbirds after the first world war are documented here. Then, recent data sets from extensive research done since the 1950s are summarized to provide a concise recounting of how waterbirds have responded to invasive species, the changes man has imposed on watersheds, discharges of synthetic contaminants, climate change and nutrient pollution, building on data collected by these early bird banders.

The many alterations provoked by man and inflicted on these lakes have spawned three distinct ecological regimes over 12 decades. The goal is to provide context for a fulsome understanding what influences and controls these lakes today and the mechanisms revealed by waterbirds that predict what we may expect as new alien species and climate change arrive. Environmental management is the art to understand what affects valued resources to be able to manage and enhance those resources for our benefit. Care for any ecosystem is identical to care required of human cultures. For, as George Santayana observed a century ago, Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. My goal is to mine historic records left by banders for the wisdom we must acquire if we are to manage the Great Lakes as sustainable ecological systems - our most fundamental obligation to both future human generations and the entire Great Lakes biota including those magnificent waterbirds.

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This book is dedicated to the man who started this work – Dr. Frederick Edwin Ludwig – photo in 1960 at the start of four decades intensive surveys of Great Lakes Waterbird colonies using his own boats.

CHAPTER 1

Learning the languages of

Great Lakes waterbirds.

Butterflies, bats, many insects and birds fly or float on gossamer threads in air, a medium denied to humans unless sophisticated technologies and immense energy are applied. I have long wondered what waterbirds might teach humans if we could converse. Waterbirds of the Great Lakes have revealed in the 20th and 21st centuries much that is relevant to the health of these ecosystems and humans that use the lakes but most often we take them for granted. I have yet to learn the syntax of the Caspian terns, ring-billed gulls, herring gulls, double-crested cormorants or the North Pacific albatrosses I was allowed to study over six decades and believe humans will never learn to converse with birds directly. Yet, these magnificent creatures reveal insights into why climate change, invasive species and contaminants cause so many deleterious changes. Humans are so focused on their own welfare that learning the inflexible limits of natural processes are buried by our possessions and cultures. We are trapped in neoliberal cultures that endorse I-ness as the driving goal, leading us to ignore nature and the commonweal. We covet I-phones, I-books, I-pads, retirement funds, personal trainers, and wealth advisors in search of validation (Harari 2014). Caught up by material pursuits, the natural world is ignored - but Mother Nature bats last, a truth we ignore at great peril. We often assume her laws and whims are irrelevant until a natural disaster forces us to confront unbridled powers that do not credit humans as a unique species in control of anything. If we ignore processes like climate change, evolution, or degradation of clean air and water we descend into chaos and come to doubt we have a future. Great Lakes waterbirds are quiet sentinels of the changes that spring up in our wake, rather like the ‘rooster-tail’ behind a fast-moving boat and the wake that follows.

Understanding how the Great Lakes have changed by research on waterbirds is an interest I inherited from my father who banded thousands of colony-nesting waterbirds on the Great Lakes islands after 1929. He was one of a handful of adventurous men to devote personal resources to colonial waterbird banding between the two World Wars. Great Lake states and Ontario banders tagged waterbirds on remote Great Lakes islands beginning in 1922. They were a diverse lot - lawyer, chemist, medical doctor, brain surgeon, insurance broker, real estate agent, chemical engineer, hardware salesman, lighthouse keeper, conservation officer, university professor, plumber and day-laborer - with educations from the 8th grade to MDs and Ph.Ds. They recorded waterbird migrations, considered bird survival, and kept records of waterbird colonies visited, quietly accumulating valuable baseline data. Later generations of academics and government scientists would access the records of these amateur natural historians who recorded what they observed to produce a more accurate understanding of the Great Lakes. This is their story told by one who inherited their work for the commonweal over almost a century and was privileged to extend it as a professional ecologist. We will not see their ilk again, for in this era of ‘I-ness’, rampant neoliberalism, free trade, ego-dominated politics and our overwhelming hubris, these men were persistent amateur natural historians: they recorded what they saw, invested meager private funds and persistent efforts to conserve Great Lakes waterbirds, expecting no recognition by any agency, person or organization. They did what they loved - banding birds to provide data for better conservation policies based on mark-recapture science, working diligently for decades until aging extinguished them. We are their beneficiaries and should acknowledge their contributions that form part of the foundation of Great Lakes science.

My father, Frederick Edwin Ludwig, at age twelve, was entranced by songbirds in his Lansing, Michigan backyard by 1921. His father, Claude C. Ludwig, knew Joe Stack, the ornithologist at Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University) and introduced Fred who was soon preparing bird skins for Stack and the College’s Museum of Zoology. During high school Fred was allowed to tag along on many of Stack’s weekend ornithology field trips learning to identify songbirds and learn their habitats. The American government took over the nascent bird banding program in 1922 under the Biological Survey (predecessor to US Fish and Wildlife Service) directed by the famous population ecologist Frederick C. Lincoln after 1921. In 1927, at eighteen Fred became a federal bird bander (Permit #3491) with Stack’s mentoring. Coincidently, Fred became Stack’s unpaid field assistant during his four undergraduate years at Michigan State (1927-1931). If not for the tragic death of his younger sister that deflected him into medicine, ornithology would have been Fred’s career of choice.

At first Fred ran a backyard banding station using wire mesh traps capturing sparrows, doves and blackbirds, but Stack soon sparked Fred’s interest in colonial waterbirds. His banding hobby was stimulated by several recoveries. The first of over 29,000 returns and recoveries that the Ludwig family would accumulate over his 74 years of banding was a bronzed grackle nestling tagged at Lansing in June 1927 and shot by a rural Kentucky farmer that November. He persuaded his father to visit Alpena to band common terns on Thunder Bay in 1929 starting a lifetime of colonial waterbird banding. During the 1930s the family banded terns and gulls on Lake Huron islands at Lone Tree and Little Charity Islands in Saginaw Bay and at Sulfer, Sugar and Scarecrow Islands in Thunder Bay, Green Island and St. Martin’s Shoal in the Straits of Mackinac and then expanded to include the Lake Michigan Beaver Islands in 1934. During the Great Depression, Fred, Claude senior and Claude junior banded 172,000 birds of 88 species through 1941; 68% of their bandings were Great Lakes’ colonial waterbirds. The Second World War with Fred’s and Claude junior’s enlistments in the U.S. military and gasoline rationing curtailed the family’s banding of Great Lakes waterbirds until 1947.

In November 1933 as Fred’s bird banding passion matured, he was asked to speak to the University of Michigan Bird Club by Josslyn Van Tyne, Chief of the Bird Division in the Museum of Zoology, and chaired by the famous pioneer neurosurgeon, Dr. Max Peet. Fred met Peet in 1927 at a Michigan Audubon Society banquet and often related how he splattered chicken gravy over Dr. Peet’s shirt and tie during the banquet. Peet was amused and the two soon formed a deep friendship over birds that lasted a lifetime. Peet even agreed to chaperone Fred and his betrothed to the Beaver Islands in 1934 where they collected specimens and banded waterbirds for two weeks. From September 1933 until his graduation in 1935 at the depths of the Great Depression, Peet paid Fred’s tuition to medical school so that Fred could finish his degree. The text of Fred’s 1933 talk has survived in his father’s papers: it offers a glimpse into the early bird populations nesting on US Lake Huron islands. It is presented below edited only to remove private comments.

A report to the University of Michigan Bird Club

on Lake Huron colony banding 1929 -1933.

by

Fred Ludwig, University of Michigan Medical Student

Dr. Van Tyne has asked me to tell you about the banding my father and I indulged in during this last year with emphasis on the banding of colony birds along the coast of Lake Huron. I am going to take the liberty to summarize the work we have completed on the common tern over a period of five years. In 1929 I was fortunate to have a course in ornithology from Mr. Stack at Michigan State College. He instilled in me the desire to band colony birds and especially the common tern. In July, 1929 Mr. Stack and [William I.] Lyon made a trip to Alpena to visit the tern colony on Sulfer Island. They found very few birds due to the high water and returned with stories of the many eggs scattered over the nesting area. A result was my first trip to a tern colony and I convinced my dad to go see the colony. We arranged a trip and visited Sulfer Island on August 2. Our luck was better than the Stack party and we banded 27 terns. Nevertheless, the trip was a success considering the storm we encountered on Thunder Bay.

In 1930, only I had the desire to go after the terns for the poor banding in 1929 had rather disheartened my father. I started out, as is the wont of college students, bumming my way north on the thumb. I arrived at Sebawaing on July 12. Manuel [Canuto Manuel from the Philippines working on a Masters degree under VanTyne] was working at Lone tree Island studying the terns. He took me over to the island where I banded 488 terns. I should thank the University of Michigan for the three meals I had with Mr. Manuel as it was impossible for me to carry food to the uninhabited island; possibly my parasitism can be forgiven. I continued my tour to Alpena to visit Sulfer Island again and was fortunate to band 367 terns this time, although I was disgusted to run out of bands. There is nothing that pains a bander more than to run out of bands when there are many birds to band. Never since have I been caught short. In that light, bird banding is a good lesson for stockbrokers.

1931 proved to be a big season with the best weather and low water levels. Trips to the colonies were made on successive weekends with members of my family. Of course, I would have to get a job for the summer and thereby interfere with the more important banding work. Lone tree Island and Big Charity in Saginaw Bay, Sulfer Island near Alpena and Black River Island were visited this year and 1,975 terns were banded. I can assure you that I did not want to work and miss all of that good banding! 1932 holds the spotlight for the greatest number of birds banded; we visited Lone tree Island, Sulfer Island and Black River Island and banded 3,346 common terns plus a few other birds.

Dr. VanTyne has been after me to keep bird counts on these summer banding trips. This year I did that and recorded some very interesting things that have almost proved my undoing. The 1933 trip was