Treesearch

Most years, bluebirds come home to Wyoming on the 23rd day of March. I know this date because I have watched the birds for decades. It is not a date of great ornithological importance. The 23rd of March is my mother's birthday, and my mother loves bluebirds. As a son, you tend to remember things like mothers and bluebirds.

The 1990 Farm Bill created the Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP) to restore and protect wetland, which as of 2002 has enrolled over 1.4 million acres of wetland and upland habitat in 49 states and Puerto Rico. The program is administered by the U. S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resource Conservation Service and delivered in cooperation with many partners from the private and government sector. The program targets converted or degraded wetlands, primarily cropland, with a high probability of successful restoration. It authorizes permanent and 30-year easements as well as 10-year agreement...

With 70 percent of Great Plains habitat in private ownership, private landowners are the key to conservation of the prairie. Prairie Partners, developed by Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory, is a cooperative and voluntary effort to work with landowners, leaseholders, and land managers to conserve shortgrass prairie birds and their habitats. The ultimate goal of Prairie Partners is to build a coalition of landowners and land managers across the Great Plains who are actively involved in the conservation of lands important to prairie birds. Outreach is imperative to raise the awareness of...

The Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's (Service) habitat restoration assistance program for private landowners, was created primarily to improve habitat for waterfowl. Since its inception in 1987, however, the program has grown to include the restoration of all types of habitat. The purpose of this paper is to explain how the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program has grown from an effort to benefit waterfowl to one that can benefit a wide variety of bird species. The Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program arose from the recognition that privately...

Saskatchewan provides habitat for a number of grassland specialists that are of high conservation concern. For example, 10 of 12 “primary endemic,” and 17 of 25 “secondary endemic” species of the Great Plains identified by Mengel (1970) regularly breed in Saskatchewan. In addition, each of the 30 species of high conservation concern currently identified in the Prairie Partners in Flight Bird Conservation Plan regularly breed in the province (Anderson et al., unpubl. data). Some species (e.g., Baird’s Sparrow, Ammodramus bairdii), reach their greatest abundance in Saskatchewan (Sauer et al....

Large-scale assessments of the distribution and diversity of birds have been challenged by the need for a robust methodology for summarizing or predicting species' geographic distributions (e.g. Beard et al. 1999, Manel et al. 1999, Saveraid et al. 2001). Methodologies used in such studies have at times been inappropriate, or even more frequently limited in their analytical scope and predictive properties (Peterson et al. 2002c). A new set of methodologies focus on modeling the dimensions of species’ ecological niches, and offer considerably improved analytical and predictive possibilities....

Regions of the world with high coastal zone biological productivity often support large numbers of birds. Important sources of this productivity are oceanographic upwelling created by winds and ocean currents, and runoff from the land. It is suggested that climate change effects on winds and ocean currents will potentially affect the timing and magnitude of coastal biological productivity, and that bird populations will seek new levels and distributions in response to these changes. We are at an early stage in projecting trends. However, ecological responses to climate change are clearly...

As the ornithological community has become more aware of natural climate variability (as opposed to weather) impacts on the life histories of birds, especially seabirds, the meteorological community has been advancing our knowledge and predictive capabilities. The latest climate information, however, is slow to transfer to the ornithological community. Climate databases that show the seasonality of El Niño, and its opposite, La Niña, back to 1951 are often not used when correlating an ENSO event (El Niño, La Niña or neutral) with breeding season, migration or over wintering. For example,...

Over the last 100 years, the global average temperature has increased approximately 0.6° C. Using information from the literature, we examine the extent to which animals and plants are already exhibiting a discernible change consistent with changing temperatures and predicted by our understanding of the species’ physiological constraints. The types of changes include poleward and altitudinal range expansions, movement of abundance patterns, and shifts in morphometrics, genetics, behavior, and in the timing of events such as animal breeding or plant blooming dates. We examined over 2500...

Global warming is expected to result in an acceleration of current rates of sea level rise, inundating many low-lying coastal and intertidal areas. This could have important implications for organisms that depend on these sites, including shorebirds that rely on them for foraging habitat during their migrations and in winter. We modeled the potential changes in the extent of intertidal foraging habitat for shorebirds at five sites in the United States that currently support internationally important numbers of migrating and wintering shorebirds. Even assuming a conservative global warming...