Click the link below the picture
.
It’s early morning in the San Gabriel Mountains, and we’re standing in an unremarkable dirt parking lot. The hills around us are dotted with chaparral vegetation, and Los Angeles sprawls just south of here. To me, this looks like any other trailhead in the greater LA area.
But we’re here, at Bear Divide, to witness an incredibly rare spectacle of nature: this is one of the only places in the western United States where you can see bird migration during daylight hours.
When our NPR team arrives, Kelsey Reckling is already here, scanning the horizon for birds. She is a PhD student at UCLA who studies bird migration.
Bear Divide is unique because it’s like a passageway through the wall of the San Gabriels. Birds are funneled through, Reckling says, and fly low enough for researchers to identify, catch, and study the species as they pass. On a really good day, Reckling says, you can see up to 20,000 birds zooming by as they travel north for the summer.
Bear Divide was only discovered as a migration hotspot in 2016. But since then, bird nerds like Reckling have flocked here to catch a glimpse of just one moment along the epic migration journey. Some of the birds we’ll see today are traveling thousands of miles — flying from as far as South America all the way up to Alaska.
As the sun peeks over the horizon, the show begins. I hear a chorus of chirping break the silence of the valley.
“Oh, here we go,” Reckling says as she spots a group of warblers coming. “We’ve got a black-throated gray warbler, a hermit warbler.”
She punches the numbers and species into a tablet, adding to a detailed database of bird sightings she and other researchers will use to study not just birds, but also bigger trends in the natural world.
“You know the canary in the coal mine saying? If we understand what’s happening to birds, we might be able to understand broader changes in the environment, in climate and things like that,” says Ian Davies of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
.
Lauren Hill, a graduate student at Cal State LA, holds a bird at the bird banding site at Bear Divide in the San Gabriel Mountains. Grace Widyatmadja/NPR
.
.
Click the link below for the article:
.
__________________________________________
James' World 2 
Leave a comment