TENNESSEE VALLEY-As the seasons change, bare trees and fields of brown flower seedheads stand sentinel in the early dusk.
It’s a world ready for winter.
Ready, too, are billions of chattering, honking, calling and chirping birds that migrated south.
Between July and November, waterfowl and songbirds traveled regular migration corridors, flying from as far north as Alaska and Canada to overwinter in warm spots as distant as the Caribbean or South America.
And their flight paths took many birds right over the Tennessee Valley region.
“Birds take paths of least resistance, whether along the top of the Appalachian Mountains or coming down the Mississippi Flyway,” Joshua Argo, Tennessee Valley Authority terrestrial zoologist, said.
And some bird species – such as waterfowl and grassland songbirds – chose to overwinter here.
That’s good news for birders living in TVA’s seven-state service area.
“TVA provides habitat diversity,” Damien Simbeck, TVA senior program manager of Natural Resources west operations, said. “If you can have wetland areas, scrub, mature forest and tall grass fields – all that in the same vicinity – you’re going to increase the number of species, because something’s going to be available for each group.”
And TVA offers up all of those habitats – reservoirs, rivers, forests and fields, as well as in the cropland TVA’s partners manage for waterfowl.
That means this winter, there’s a spot for everyone to enjoy birds.
Bird Brain
If someone says, “bird brain,” it should be a compliment.
From the smallest warbler to the largest crane, birds know how to follow the same migratory paths year after year.
Flying solo or in flocks, they navigate at night all the way across the country – even the continent – in different types of weather over hills, forests and fields that can change year to year.
“Some fly across the Gulf of Mexico to get to Central and South America,” Simbeck said. “They go from the Alabama and Louisiana coast to the Yucatan Peninsula in a single flight. Others actually go around the Gulf through Texas and Mexico, and then others just go through Florida and spend the winter in the Caribbean.”
And they’re very efficient about it.
“Birds fly south enough to survive, but make the flight as short as possible,” Simbeck said.
For many birds, the final winter destination is here in the Southeast.
People can spot them near rivers and reservoirs and in the transition zones between forests and fields.
Winter waterfowl residents include lesser and greater scaup, ring-necked ducks, sandhill cranes and white pelicans.
Reservoirs offer special shoreline habitat because TVA’s river managers draw down water levels each fall. That exposes wide strips of mudflats where large birds such as migratory sandhill cranes can spend the night, foraging for crunchy crustaceans and aquatic insects.
Surrounding flooded fields – managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or state wildlife agencies – offer cozy cover and nutritious grain.
“We have a population of white pelicans that overwinters on Watts Bar Reservoir from the Great Lakes region,” Argo said.
Wheeler and Kentucky reservoirs have large white pelican populations, too, Simbeck said, and it’s for a unique reason.
“In historical times, they migrated from the upper Great Plains, Manitoba and Alberta (Canada) south to coastal Texas and Louisiana,” he said. “They got wiped out by DDT (in the mid-1900s) and their numbers plummeted. (By the time) DDT was banned and their numbers started coming up, TVA had built reservoirs in the southeastern U.S.”
And pelicans used their bird brains to adapt.
“The new populations said, ‘OK, why go to Texas if I can go to Kentucky and Tennessee and Alabama?’” Simbeck said. “‘It’s a shorter flight and there’s plenty of food. I fly as short a distance as I can to survive.’”
Media Release/TVA Newsroom
