New Edition of The Birds of the Ligonier Valley
Annie Lindsay, Banding Program Manager at Powdermill, authored the new edition of her mentor Robert Leberman’s book, The Birds of the Ligonier Valley. Written in the style of traditional naturalists, the first edition, published in 1976, contains detailed accounts for all species of birds recorded in the Ligonier Valley. The new 2022 edition provides updates on changes in status and local distribution since the first edition, and describes population and phenological changes related to the warming climate. Forty-three new species recorded in the Ligonier Valley since the publication of the first edition also appear, including the Brewer’s Sparrow that was captured and banded at Powdermill in 2020. The book incorporates sightings submitted by local birders, bird banding records and avian research projects conducted by Powdermill ornithologists, sightings submitted to eBird, Breeding Bird Atlas records, and Christmas Bird Count data.
The Birds of the Ligonier Valley is available in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History store and at Powdermill Nature Reserve’s nature center gift shop, or you can order your copy online.
Monograph: Relationships Among Body Mass, Fat, Wing Length, Age, and Sex for 170 Species of Birds Banded at Powdermill Nature Reserve
The Eastern Bird Banding Association announces the publication of its first Monograph
This monograph summarizes and uses statistical analyses of large amounts of biological data on North American species of birds and is specifically designed to foster their use by other researchers. Hopefully, it will serve the needs of many researchers and encourage others who possess similar data to summarize and analyze them. (Funding was provided by the Eastern Bird Banding Association; additional funding by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.)
The monograph contains 184 pages including:
- Introduction
- Methods (data analysis and statistical analysis)
- Acknowledgements
- Descriptive Statistics
- Graphs and Statistical Analysis
- Appendix 1. showing seasonal composition (percent) of samples of birds analyzed for this study,
- Appendix 2. summary of results of one-way ANOVAs for age and sex on body mass and wing length
- Appendix 3. wing length cutoffs based on birds sexed by physical evidence
- Literature Cited
- Index of Scientific Names
- Index of Common Names