Merit birds

[pdli...@gmail.com]

My head is still spinning after the past couple of days.

An interesting weather system passed through the province on October 16. There was a big, well defined frontal boundary extending from Florida to NL. Temperatures shot up to 17o in St. John's. I even saved satellite images of it during the day wondering if anything like a rail would turn up. That was the same evening a Yellow-breasted Bunting and Dickcissel showed up at Vern's feeder in English Harbour, Forteau, NL, and followed the next morning with a Clay-colored Sparrow.

I learned about the Forteau sighting at 5:30 am on Tuesday, 17 October, was in the car to leave St. John's at 6:30 am, caught the St. Barbe ferry one second before it departed at 3:30 pm, and saw the bird at 5:30 pm.

If you go to a big Buddhist temple in a place like Phnom Penh, the first thing you'll encounter are kids outside selling wild finches in cages so you can release the birds as part of the merit tradition of ahimsa. It's basically a means of making a peace offering, and it originated from the similar Chinese custom of fang sheng. It's something you do for the fun of it and the kids make a bit of money.

Catching birds for release is stressful and so many YBBUs have been caught in southeast Asia there is evidence their numbers are declining. Efforts are under way to restrict the use of YBBUs for merit release.

Some countries allow for the importation of YBBUs for religious purposes. Not sure if anybody knows what the Canadian or U.S. rules are now on YBBU importation. I imagine nobody knows. In any event, YBBUs are imported into North America for merit release.

Great record thanks to Vern no matter where it came from.

Paul

[brucema...@gmail.com]

How do you know that Yellow-breasted Buntings are being imported into North America for use as Merit Birds? Surely US and Canadian laws would make it illegal to release of non-native species of wild birds and animals into the wild even when taking religious traditions into consideration. Of course that is not saying it doesn't happen under the radar of the law as the importation of caged birds from the tropics and other areas occurs illegally now.

The recent announcement by Birdlife International says Yellow-breasted Buntings populations are falling rapidly to critical levels due to being captured in large numbers for food, mainly in rice fields in China during the winter. Details are at this site below if you haven't already read it.

http://www.birdlife.org/asia/news/yellow-breasted-bunting-declined-90


Bruce (still in Solitary on the Grand Banks hoping for release Friday night to begin The Road to YBBU)

[Jared Clarke]

Certainly there is no way to be sure where this bird came from or how it got there ... and a release/escapee is possible. But if YBBU were being released in North America with any regularity (for religious or other reasons), one would expect more reports of them in North America. Unlike some other regularly kept cage birds of Old World origin (think Canaries or even European Goldfinch), I am not aware of YBBU being seen anywhere in North America outside of where they might be expected as natural vagrants (i.e. Alaska and two undocumented reports on the west coast).

JC

[David Shepherd]

And, as I mentioned in a post somewhere else, it IS prime Sibe vagrant time in Europe - Mugimaki Flycatcher on one of the Lofoten Islands in Norway last week!

It's beginning to look like Vernon's backyard is a vagrant trap!

DS

[pdli...@gmail.com]

Years ago I tried to find out how many pet birds are imported into Canada each year. I forget what the number was but it was astonishingly high and included a lot of European species including things like Bullfinch, Greenfinch, European Goldfinch, etc. Commercial captive breeding also taking place in Canada. One or two sites in western Canada even sell Gyrfalcons. Somebody is advertising Ring-neck Doves for sale in St. John's.

Then there are the numerous US aviculture sites like birdexpress.net, birdsnow.com, and thefinchfarm.com.

The ceremonial release of captive birds in North America is another world, and very low profile (see for example "Cultural Releases as a Pathway for Invasive Species" by Debrupa Pathak, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources).

The Forteau YBBU is an amazing record. I'm trying to convince myself it can't be a wild bird but after spending hours digging through the literature I'm starting to wonder. I don't think it came via Europe, or at least not recently. Maybe it came over the pole or tunneled through the Earth, or it has been living in North America for some time.

Supposed to be good eating.

Paul

[ILJones]

the Strait of Belle Isle is a major trans-Atlantic shipping lane with vessels from Europe transiting by Forteau nearly ever day (during the ice free season)

The IUCN account for Yellow-breasted Bunting (that lists this species as endangered)

http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/22720966/0

states: "the decline is likely to be driven by excessive trapping at migration and, in particular, wintering sites " and "thousands of males are also stuffed and sold as mascots, since their presence in the home is thought to confer happiness" and "At least locally, for example in Cambodia, birds are trapped for "merit release" in temples"

the bird's tail feathers are damaged in a way consistent with captivity and not often seen in wild birds

these^ points need to be considered in evaluating the Forteau bird's wild status

but other facts are also important...

Yellow-breasted Buntings are a long distance migrant with many records far outside their normal range

weather patterns during early- to mid-October in NL were extremely favourable for delivery of long-distance vagrants

Yellow-breasted Bunting vagrancy in the Western Palearctic (Britain) includes many records ranging from late August to late October with a peak in mid-September, records in Britain have fallen off the virtually none in the last decade, in correlation with the species breeding population collapse

I would say it is a toss-up - using the criterion of 'beyond reasonable doubt' we cannot reject the possibility that this individual is wild and got there on its own

countable