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Published: July 26, 2012

The Bird Halls, maps, and Downy Woodpeckers in the Chicago region

John Bates, Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences, Negaunee Integrative Research Center

We are putting maps in with each species covered by a digital label for our permanent bird halls that will soon be unveiled as the Ronald and Christina Gidwitz Hall of Birds.  Amy Schleser of our exhibit department has been working on a wide variety of maps she pulled together for various species.  At a recent meeting, we went over a set of them.  I have always loved maps, and we are trying to present some of the many different ways maps can illustrate interesting things about birds.  One of our chosen species is Downy Woodpecker (Arlene Koziol took the great picture of the Downy).  For this species, Amy created the map based on e-bird sightings for the Chicago region.

We are putting maps in with each species covered by a digital label for our permanent bird halls that will soon be unveiled as the Ronald and Christina Gidwitz Hall of Birds.  Amy Schleser of our exhibit department has been working on a wide variety of maps she pulled together for various species.  At a recent meeting, we went over a set of them.  I have always loved maps, and we are trying to present some of the many different ways maps can illustrate interesting things about birds.  One of our chosen species is Downy Woodpecker (Arlene Koziol took the great picture of the Downy).  For this species, Amy created the map based on e-bird sightings for the Chicago region. It is shown below.  E-bird is the public database of bird observations created by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

The mapping features in e-bird are such a cool tool.  At first glance, the map is a pretty solidly covered with sightings (the points on the map) which one should probably expect for a bird like Downy woodpecker, but a closer look brings out interesting details.  There is a vertical line of points in the upper part of the map.  This corresponds to the Des Plaines River and the forest preserve district along it.  Similarly there are two large aggregations of sightings to the south of the city.  These correspond to large forest preserve districts centered on the Palos Hills area and the Morton Arboretum.  There are also plenty of pins along the lakefront (Lake Michigan).   You can see these areas in green in the map below.  All these places are where you might expect Downy Woodpeckers to be most common, but they are also the places where people go to look for birds.

Looking closely also reveals gaps where there are few or no reports of Downy Woodpeckers.  One of these is near the center of the map, and it corresponds to O’Hare International Airport.  There is not a lot of good Downy Woodpecker habitat out at O’Hare.  The other gaps tell another story.  One is around Garfield Park.  Another is basically bounded by I-55 in the north, I-294 on the west and I-94 on the east.  Running south to Blue Island. A portion of this area is Midway International Airport, but much of the rest of this space is neighborhoods.  A little googling can show you some maps with similar focus on these areas.  These are the poorest neighborhoods in the city, where there are the highest crime rates.  So do these maps tell us about Downy Woodpeckers or humans?  Actually, I think the truth is they tell us about both.  It illustrates how important the forest preserves are for a species like Downy Woodpecker.  The fact that there are still plenty of Downy Woodpeckers outside of these areas speaks to the ability of Downy Woodpeckers to adapt to urban landscapes and that our Chicago region neighborhoods generally have enough big trees and parks to satisfy this species.  I suspect that the dearth of Downy Woodpeckers on the southside is not real, but what is real is that people in these neighborhoods do not have the luxury of looking for Downy Woodpeckers.  I’d love to see that change.  How do we get more birdwatchers on the southside?

Here is a link some other maps to compare with the one Amy prepared: 

http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2010/05/chicago-and-michigan-neighborhood.html

John Bates
Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences

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The tropics harbor the highest species diversity on the planet.  I am most intrigued by evolution at the tips of the tree of life.  My students and I study genetic structure in tropical birds and other organisms to address how this diversity evolved and how it continues to evolve as climates change and humans continue to alter landscapes.

We study comparative genetic structure and evolution primarily in the Afrotropics, the Neotropics, and the Asian tropics.  I am an ornithologist, but students working with me and my wife Shannon Hackett and other museum curators also have studied amphibians and small mammals (bats and rodents) and more recently internal, external and blood parasites (e.g., Lutz et al. 2015, Block et al. 2015, Patitucci et al. 2016).  Research in the our lab has involved gathering and interpreting genetic data in both phylogeographic and phylogenetic frameworks. Phylogenetic work on Neotropical birds has focused on rates of diversification and comparative biogeography (Tello and Bates 2007, Pantané et al 2009, Patel et al. 2011, Lutz et al. 2013, Dantas et al. 2015).  Phylogeographic work has sought to understand comparative patterns of divergence at level of population and species across different biomes (Bates et al 2003, Bates et al. 2004, Bowie et al. 2006, I. Caballero dissertation research, Block et al. 2015, Winger and Bates 2015, Lawson et al. 2015).  We also have used genetic data to better understand evolutionary patterns in relation to climate change across landscapes (e.g., Carnaval and Bates 2007) that include the Albertine Rift (through our MacArthur Grants, e.g., Voelker et al. 2010, Engel et al. 2014), the Eastern Arc Mountains (Lawson dissertation research, Lawson et al. 2015), the Philippines (T. Roberts and S. Weyandt dissertation research) and South America, particularly the Amazon (Savit dissertation research, Savit and Bates 2015, Figueiredo et al. 2013), and we are entering into the genomic realm focusing initially on Andean (Winger et al. 2015) and Amazonian birds (through our NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant). Shane DuBay is doing his dissertation research in the Himalayas on physiological plasticity in Tarsiger Bush Robins.  Nick Crouch, who I co-advise at U. Illinois, Chicago with Roberta Mason-Gamer, is studying specialization in birds from a modern phylogenetic perspective.  We seek to create a broader understanding of diversification in the tropics from a comparative biogeographic framework (Silva and Bates 2002, Kahindo et al, 2007, Bates et al. 2008, Antonelli et al. 2009).  João Capurucho (U. Illinois, Chicago, co-advised with Mary Ashley)  is studying phlylogeography of Amazonian white sand specialist birds and Natalia Piland (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the impact of urbanization on Neotropical birds.  New graduate student Valentina Gomez Bahamon (U. Illinois, Chicago) is also working Boris Igic and me, after doing her Master Degree in her native Colombia on genomics and the evolution of migrating Fork-tailed Flycatchers (Tyrannus savana).  Jacob Cooper (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the diversification of birds in Afromonte forests

Josh Engel and I are working up multi-species phylogeographic studies of birds across the Albertine Rift, based the Bird Division's long term research throughout the region.  We are working up similar data sets for Malawian birds.  Our current NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant on the assembly of the Amazonian biota and our NSF grant to survey birds and their parasites across the southern Amazon are generating genomic data for analysis in collaboration with paleoecologists, climatologists, geologists, and remote sensing experts from the U.S. and Brazil.  These large collaborative projects are providing new perspectives on the history of Amazonia.

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