Changes in heron and egret populations on the Laurentian Great Lakes and connecting channels, 1977-2009

Canadian and U.S. federal wildlife agencies completed four decadal surveys, spanning the years 1977 to 2009, to census colonial waterbirds breeding on the Great Lakes and adjoining bodies of water. In this paper, we reports abundance, distribution, and general population trends of three species: Black-crowned Night-Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax), Great Egret (Ardea alba), and Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias). Estimates of nest numbers ranged from approximately 4000-6100 for the Black-crowned Night-Heron, 250-1900 for the Great Egret, and 3800-6400 for the Great Blue Heron. Average annual rates of change in nest numbers between the first (1977) and fourth (2008) census were −1% for the Black-crowned Night-Heron, +23% for the Great Egret, and −0.27% for the Great Blue Heron. Across the 30-year census, Black-crowned Night-Heron estimates decreased in U.S. (−57%) but increased (+18%) in Canadian waters, Great Egret nests increased 1381% in Canadian waters with a smaller, but still substantial increase in the number of nests at U.S. colonies (+613%), and Great Blue Heron numbers increased 148% in Canadian waters and 713% in U.S. waters. Although a single factor cannot be clearly linked to changes observed in each species’ distribution, hydrological variation, habitat succession, nest competition with Double-crested Cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus), and land use changes likely all contributed. Management activities should support both breeding and foraging conditions including restoration of early successional habitats and anticipate continued northward expansions in the distributions of these waterbirds.

From ideals to reality: The women's smallholding colony at Lingfield, 1920-39

The immediate impetus for the colony at Lingfield in Surrey was the desire by the Women's Farm and Garden Association to enable women who had worked on the land during the First World War to be able to farm on their own account. However the motivation for the colony can also be traced back to late nineteenth-century ideals. The colony soon ran into problems which were exacerbated by the adverse agricultural conditions of the early 1920s. The association responded constructively but the colony was wound down from 1929. At one level the colony could be seen as a failure, yet this article argues that the 19 colony provided a rural community where single women lived in a mutually supportive environment.

Archaeology on Egypt's edge: archaeological research in the Dakhleh Oasis, 1819-1977

This article provides the first substantial survey of early archaeological research in Egypt’s Dakhleh Oasis. In addition to providing a much-needed survey of research, this study embeds Dakhleh’s regional research history within a broader archaeological research framework. Moreover, it explores the impact of contemporaneous historical events in Egypt and Europe upon the development of archaeology in Dakhleh. This contextualised approach allows us to trace influences upon past research trends and their impacts upon current research and approaches, as well as suggest directions for future research.

Life before ‘The New Biography’: Modernist biographical methods in the Hogarth Press ‘Books on Tolstoi’ 1920-24

In the early 1920s, before Virginia Woolf wrote her now well-known essays “The New Biography” and “The Art of Biography,” the Hogarth Press published four biographies of Tolstoy. Each of these English translations of Russian works takes a different approach to biographical composition, and as a group they offer multiple and contradictory perspectives on Tolstoy’s character and on the genre of biography in the early twentieth century. These works show that Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press took a multi-perspectival, modernist approach to publishing literary lives.