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T O P I C S I N C O N S E R VAT I O N

Terry RichU. S. Fish & Wildlife Service

1387 South Vinnell Way

Boise, Idaho 83709

terry_rich@fws.gov

Finding, identifying, and counting birds arethe fundamental activities that we birders en-joy. But most of us can do more to count

birds in a systematic way and contribute to a trulyworthy goal: to have an adequate understanding ofwhether the birds of North America are increasing innumber, decreasing, or holding their own. Youmight think we already know these things, but wedon’t—not for many species.

Partners in Flight recently published the NorthAmerican Landbird Conservation Plan, which is notso much a plan as a continental assessment of the448 species of native landbirds that regularly breedin the U. S. and Canada. This analysis of the futurevulnerability of these species is the result of years ofwork by experts from around North America. I encourage you to check out the Plan online at <partnersinflight.org/cont_plan/default.htm>. Whatwe discovered in this analysis is that fully 243 ofthese species (54%) have data inadequate for theproper determination of their long-term, continentalpopulation trends. I hasten to add that in many cas-

es we have some data, many anecdotal observations, and some goodhunches. But we can do better in a society with a burgeoning number ofbirders and a slew of good ornithologists and biometricians.

Population monitoring is critical for all stages of conservation, includ-ing assessment of population status, identification of factors causing pop-ulation change, setting population objectives, and evaluating the successof our conservation actions. At the continental level, we rely heavily onthe Breeding Bird Survey. While the Breeding Bird Survey provides data formany landbirds, work is needed to improve survey precision for manyspecies. For other species, the Breeding Bird Survey is unsuitable and willremain so even if survey coverage and analysis are improved. While theChristmas Bird Count has the longest run of bird count data on this con-tinent, experts are only now beginning to analyze the data with the sort ofrigor required. We expect many valuable new results in the near future.

For those interested in the monitoring needs of all 243 species that arenot currently adequately monitored, I refer the reader to the plan men-tioned above. Here I will summarize information for all landbird speciesand then focus on species of highest conservation importance—those thatshow some combination of apparent population declines, small ranges, ordistinct threats to habitat, and which also have inadequate monitoringdata. These are the Partners in Flight Watch List species, 100 in all.

Based on the source and quality of data for determining long-term pop-ulation trends, we can define three groups of species with the greatestneeds for better trend information.

B I R D I N G • J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 6

In North America, 85 species of breeders, including the Varied Bunting, lack basic population trenddata (increasing, decreasing, or stable). Santa Cruz County, Arizona; June 2005. © Alan Murphy.

MonitoringNeeds

of NorthAmerica’s

Landbirds

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Category 1: Species for which we have no trend dataThese are species for which there are essentially no data on population trend.There are 85 species in this category (Map 1). Many of these species breed alongthe U. S. – Mexico border, have large breeding populations south of the Mexicanborder, or winter in Mexico and Central America. Thus, increased monitoring ef-forts in the U. S. alone will not be sufficient to permit accurate estimation ofrange-wide trends. The distribution of these speciesshows the need to expand bird monitoringprograms in Mexico.

The highest-priority birds in thisgroup include 24 species on the Part-ners in Flight Watch List: MontezumaQuail, White-crowned Pigeon, GreenParakeet, Thick-billed Parrot, Red-crowned Parrot, Mangrove Cuckoo, FlammulatedOwl, Elf Owl, Antillean Nighthawk, Elegant Trogon,Arizona Woodpecker, Thick-billed Kingbird, Black-capped Vireo, Island Scrub-Jay, California Gnatcatcher,Black-capped Gnatcatcher, Colima Warbler, Golden-cheeked Warbler, Red-faced Warbler, Rufous-wingedSparrow, Five-striped Sparrow, Varied Bunting, andAudubon’s Oriole. McKay’s Bunting is a Category 1species that is also in Category 3 (p. 32).

Category 2: Species for which the BBS is inadequateThis category includes 106 species for which BreedingBird Survey trends have low precision, or where trendswere based on Christmas Bird Count trend graphs forwhich precision estimates are unavailable. Some ofthese species have narrow ranges, but many broadlydistributed species also are sampled sporadically or notat all by the Breeding Bird Survey (Map 2). The latter in-clude, for example, raptors, nocturnal species, grouse,and species of boreal and arctic re-gions. Many of these species willrequire surveys targeted at cer-tain habitats or species groups,such as raptor migration countsor nocturnal owl monitoring.

On the one hand, Map 2shows that monitoring cover-age can be thorough in areas of

31W W W . A M E R I C A N B I R D I N G . O R G

We do not have basic monitoring

data for more than half the

landbird species that regularly

breed in the ABA Area. The

California Thrasher is one of

the 243 species with insufficient

data. This article examines

monitoring needs for North

America’s landbirds, and

explains how birders can

make valuable contri-

butions to landbird

monitoring.Los Angeles County,

California;

January 2005.

© Brian E.

Small

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high human population—for example, the eastern UnitedStates. On the other hand, there are regions with manygood birders that do not have correspondingly good moni-toring coverage; consider the example of California.

Category 2 includes 34 Watch List species, among themGreater Sage-Grouse, Blue Grouse, Greater Prairie-Chicken,Swallow-tailed Kite, Band-tailed Pigeon, White-throatedSwift, Black Swift, Costa’s Hummingbird, Calliope Hum-mingbird, Allen’s Hummingbird, Lewis’s Woodpecker, Red-cockaded Woodpecker, White-headed Woodpecker, GrayVireo, Bendire’s Thrasher, California Thrasher, Le Conte’sThrasher, Virginia’s Warbler, Worm-eating Warbler, Abert’sTowhee, Bachman’s Sparrow, Black-chinned Sparrow,Henslow’s Sparrow, Nelson’s Sharp-tailed Sparrow, Salt-

marsh Sharp-tailed Sparrow, Seaside Sparrow, Tricol-ored Blackbird, Black Rosy-Finch, Brown-cappedRosy-Finch, and Lawrence’s Goldfinch. Four speciesqualify in both Category 2 and Category 3 (de-scribed below): Bay-breasted Warbler, Harris’s Spar-row, Smith’s Longspur, and Rusty Blackbird.

Category 3: Species with inadequatenorthern coverageSpecies in this category have more than one-third oftheir range in boreal and arctic regions, north of theBreeding Bird Survey coverage area (Map 3). Signifi-cant bias can be present in trend estimates where sucha large part of the population is not monitored. Thiscategory includes 96 species, 8 of which are on theWatch List: Short-eared Owl, Olive-sided Flycatcher,and Canada Warbler, plus the five species listed abovethat also occur in Categories 1 and 2. Many species inthis category are migratory, wintering in the U. S.,Mexico, or Central America (Map 4) such that theyare amenable to monitoring by migration counts orwinter surveys such as the Christmas Bird Count.

◆ ◆ ◆

It happens to be a good time to identify the short-comings in our knowledge of rangewide bird popu-lation trends because there is a new initiative un-derway to address these needs: Coordinated BirdMonitoring. The goal of Coordinated Bird Monitor-ing is to improve efficiency of monitoring throughcoordination among all those individuals, agencies,and organizations who count birds to ensure that allbird species are adequately monitored. Such an un-dertaking obviously is complex due to the numberof species, partners, and existing programs in-volved, and because a well-designed, coordinated

program, especially if begun completely from scratch,would take some brain power to create. Coordinated BirdMonitoring will account for issues such as detectability,sources of bias, sampling frames, and statistical power.

Some of the components of Coordinated Bird Monitoringwill include:

• Improved monitoring in the western U. S. and Canada,and in the arctic.

• Improved data quality for the many northern and arcticspecies that can most easily be monitored on their tem-perate wintering grounds, by conducting additional crit-ical evaluation of winter surveys, especially the Christ-mas Bird Count.

L A N D B I R D M O N I T O R I N G

The Landbird Plan identifies 106 species, including the Worm-eating Warbler (top) and Costa’sHummingbird (bottom), that are inadequately sampled by the Breeding Bird Survey.

Galveston County, Texas; April 2004. © Alan Murphy.

Kern County, California; November 2005. © Bob Steele.

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• An increase in the number of routes in the Breeding BirdSurvey and in similar existing programs.

• New programs for nocturnal species, certain raptors, andother species whose ecology or behavior makes them dif-ficult to detect by conventional census methods.

• Support for the Mexican government and partners to de-velop and implement the Mexican Bird Monitoring Strate-gy, particularly standardized breeding season monitoring.

• Pursuing the Monitoring in Protected Areas in Mexicoprogram as a means of monitoring neotropical migrantsduring the non-breeding season.

• Continued improvement of migration monitoring tomeet information needs of many raptors and of the largegroup of northern-nesting neotropical migrants that arelargely inaccessible for monitoring both in the breedingand wintering seasons.

• Improved standardization, management, and accessibili-ty of the many existing bird-monitoring datasets.

• Improved analytical capabilities across multiple pro-grams, taking advantage of rapid advances in computerand internet technologies.

• Increased cooperation and coordination among agenciesand jurisdictions.

Another important monitoring need is to track theamount, condition, and configuration of the habitats onwhich birds depend. Habitat monitoring cannot substitutefor population monitoring, because bird numbers oftenfluctuate independently of habitat condition. Nonetheless,knowledge of habitat change is a crucial component of our

Map 1. Number of landbird species in Monitoring Need Category 1 (no trend data)that occur in each “latilong” (latitude-longitude block) during the breeding season.Map by Kei Sochi.

A special challenge for landbird monitoringinvolves those species with breeding ranges that

extend well to the north of the Breeding BirdSurvey region. There are 96 such species,

among them the Olive-sided Fly-catcher. Aitken County, Minnesota;

June 2002. © Brian E. Small.

Map 2. Number of landbird species in Monitoring Need Category 2 (imprecise Breeding BirdSurvey trends) that occur in each latilong during the breeding season. Map by Kei Sochi.

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L A N D B I R D M O N I T O R I N G

ability to under-stand populationtrends. Analysis ofremotely senseddata has oftenbeen used for thispurpose regionally,but is lacking at na-tional and continen-tal scales. Partners inFlight recommends acoordinated programof regular habitat as-sessment on a conti-nental scale.

Landbird conserva-tion in North Ameri-ca has made majoradvances in the pastdecade, and a matur-ing infrastructure isprepared to accom-plish large-scale,long-term conserva-tion across the conti-nent. But a criticalcomponent for all of us is to know whether a species is increasing in number, de-creasing, or remaining steady. These population trends are an essential ingredi-ent in our ability to prioritize conservation action so that we can use our limitedresources where they are most needed.

Birders can and must play a role in Coordinated Bird Monitoring. We are theexperts. One of the biggest sources of error in bird monitoring is simply the mis-takes made by observers. These mistakes take many forms, and nobody is per-fect. But we should ensure that the best birders are using their skills, contribut-ing their knowledge, and sharing their passion for birding to the greater good ofour shared future. Please visit the Partners in Flight web site <pif.org> for up-dates to the monitoring needs assessment.

I encourage you to participate now in the Breeding Bird Surveys, ChristmasBird Counts, and other monitoring programs near you. All of these programs canuse more good birders. And as we create new protocols, and establish new routes,points, and stations of various kinds, I hope to see you out there.

Map 3. Number oflandbird species inMonitoring NeedCategory 3 (inade-quate northern cov-erage) that occur ineach latilong duringthe breeding season.Map by Kei Sochi.

Map 4. Number of landbird species in Monitoring Need Category 3 (inadequatenorthern coverage) that occur in each latilong during winter. Map by Kei Sochi.

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