Climate Point: Bird mysteries and wonders

A northern flicker spreads its wings like beautiful yellow-and-charcoal fans and launches from a branch overlooking Braddock Bay on Lake Ontario .

The eastern, yellow-shafted flicker offers a fantastic view of its black-spotted chest to a USA TODAY Network photojournalist in Rochester, and the resulting image becomes one more alluring photograph for New York state readers.

Veteran journalist Shawn Dowd took this photo while roaming around the East Spit in Greece, New York , in April while working on a pair of stories, including the topic of improved water quality near the shoreline. He and fellow journalist Tina Macintyre-Yee spend the warm season getting out there as much as possible.

"I love bird photography because it is both a challenge and a great stress-reliever," Dowd said. "It can be done any time between assignments, and every month of the year. I find it oddly calming to just walk in the great outdoors and try to capture compelling images of such free creatures."

I have thought about birds all spring and summer as talented shooters in my newsroom have trekked around the shore of the smallest of all the Great Lakes. Beyond the beauty involved, changes in migration and feeding habits during increasing global warming have been on my mind. Other network journalists watch those patterns closely.

What can we learn from paying attention? And is it possible that we will never have a spring-summer with our hometown avian friends that is quite the same ever again?

Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to stories about climate change, energy and the environment. I'm William Ramsey, enterprise editor at the Democrat and Chronicle.

Macintyre-Yee likens the hunt for bird sightings to the hidden pictures puzzle pages in the old Highlights magazines: It's a busy, busy scene — can you find the bird?

She gains intimate knowledge of these creatures as she listens for birdcalls, scans branches and learns more about each species. It's fascinating and a good break from heavy journalism.

A bird mystery from the Amazon to Colorado

The Fort Collins Coloradoan shared a remarkable story of bird-journalist interaction this week with readers. Ignacio Calderon was in the San Luis Valley of Alamosa County with scientists looking for one of the most cryptic birds in the American continent: the black swift.

The team had been hiking in the dark to capture both data and images at dawn.

"The black swift — which weighs about the same as a golf ball and is small enough to fit in your hand — breeds in the western U.S. and Canada, where it nests in mountainous areas close to waterfalls. For a long time, researchers didn’t know where black swifts migrated to," Calderon writes.

A senior spatial ecologist at the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies explained that the black swift "was one of the last bird species, if not the last" to have a migration path unknown to researchers. Until recently, that is. Read more of his story here , including information about climate change influences.

Caught in Hurricane Debby, a migrating bird ends up where she started

What happens when a migrating bird gets caught in the winds of one of the increasingly more common treacherous wind events?

Dinah Voyles Pulver, Ramon Padilla and Janet Loehrke tackled this question for a satisfying graphic story recently.

In this case, it was a swallow-tailed kite named Suwannee 22. A GPS transmitter on her back told the harrowing story of her encounter with Debby’s treacherous winds as the storm crossed Cuba and moved north in the Gulf of Mexico. Coordinates recorded by the Avian Research and Conservation Institute show how the hurricane re-routed the bird during her journey.

"Swallow-tailed kites are some of Florida’s most breathtaking birds, with their deeply forked tails, bright white and glistening blue-black features and aerial acrobatics," reads the story. "In the late 1990s, the kites’ population was estimated at a couple of thousand birds, but today their numbers may be as high as 15,000-20,000. ... They nest in seven southeastern states but venture farther north in the summer. Her transmitter shows Suwannee 22 spent time this summer in Georgia and Alabama before returning to her home roost."

What would happen to her in Hurricane Debby? Read the story here .

When do the hummingbirds leave?

As summer winds down and kids return to school, one small bird is preparing for a monumental journey, Cybele Mayes-Osterman of USA TODAY tells readers .

" Hummingbird migration season gets underway in August, sending the birds flying to warm destinations thousands of miles away to last out the cold winter months and bringing bird-watchers new opportunities to catch sight of them on their trip.

Weighing as little as 2 grams , hummingbirds don't appear to be formidable creatures. But every year as autumn approaches, many birds native to the U.S. set off on a long journey south in search of warmer climates and blooming flowers.

Read on for more, including the fate of a sea turtle in Cape Cod. Some stories below may require a subscription. Sign up and get access to all eNewspapers in the USA TODAY Network. If someone forwarded you this email and you'd like to receive Climate Point in your inbox for free once a week, sign up here .

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Climate Point: Bird mysteries and wonders