For nearly 10 years, Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory has enjoyed a partnership with the Audubon Society of Greater Denver for bird banding and environmental education at the Audubon Center at Chatfield State Park near Denver.

RMBO ornithologists have banded more than 3,000 birds of 86 species at the Chatfield banding station in the past six years. Each year they also recapture 50-60 birds that they have banded in a prior year, providing valuable information about the migration behavior and longevity of species. 

They have also captured the imagination of thousands of children, connecting them with nature through the bird-banding experience. Thousands more birders, nature enthusiasts, families and others have visited the banding station. As the activity’s popularity grew, the picnic table that served as the research station and place to showcase and teach about birds needed an upgrade.

More than 100 guests gathered at the site on the evening of May 4 for the opening of a new pavilion that will serve as an outdoor classroom where school groups and others can enjoy seeing and hearing about birds, banding and conservation.

The new pavilion came about after ASGE Executive Director Karl Brummert and Rick Sommerfeld of the University of Colorado’s College of Architecture and Planning discussed giving students in the Design-Build Certificate Program an opportunity to create, design and build an actual project. Denver Water, which owns the land where the pavilion sits, generously offered funding for the materials. Several other partners contributed additional resources for the facility.

Photos by Seth Gallagher: Partners cut ribbon; Meredith McBurney demonstrates bird banding

RMBO has released “Wintering Grassland Bird Densities in Chihuahuan Desert Grassland Priority Conservation Areas, 2007-2011,” documenting bird abundance, distribution, habitat use and other information collected over five years in three U.S. and six Mexican states. The Chihuahuan Desert is the primary wintering grounds for more than 90 percent of western North America’s migratory grassland birds.

Insight into the poorly known wintering ecology of grassland birds is critical to determine causes for their ongoing population declines and to support their full-life-cycle conservation needs. This first-ever region-wide survey effort was made possible thanks to many supporting agencies and partners, including the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Act, and the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo Leon’s Facultad de Ciéncias Biológicas in Monterrey, Mexico.  Visit RMBO’s International Program web page to stay informed on our habitat conservation, research and outreach efforts in the Chihuahuan Desert.
Photo: Baird's Sparrow by Jose Hugo Martinez

 

Six years ago in late August, Rich Levad, Rob Sparks, Jason Beason and Ken Behrens hiked through spruce fir forest to a spot just above timberline where a Black Swift nest clung to a wet, rocky outcrop. The outing was part of Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory’s effort to collect baseline data on this little-known species.  When no swifts were seen that evening, the scientists wondered if they had already started migrating – and where did they go?   

A couple of clues had led some ornithologists to infer that Black Swifts migrate to South America for winter from their breeding grounds in North America. In 1993 Stiles and Negret discovered a Black Swift subspecies, niger borealis, in Colombia. Also, the lack of feather molt on Black Swifts sighted before or during migration, gave rise to speculation that Black Swifts have a long migration route and molt after migration. 

Now the research team (see 3-3-12 post) has cracked the mystery of the swifts’ migration path and winter destination using geolocators.  So when do Black Swifts migrate south?  Rob Sparks conducted the analysis for this study and graphed longitude and date to get migration windows for all three swifts from which geolocators were recovered. The graph (left) shows the rate and timing of each individual and where they overlapped on their journey south.  Interestingly, the fall migration window overlapped that of the Black Swifts seen by Stiles and Negret (Oct.3-Oct.12) in Colombia. 

The map (right) shows the birds’ spring migration (range May 9 to June 18). The geolocators revealed that the Amazon Basin in northwest Brazil is where these Black Swifts spend their non-breeding season – a suitable place for such an elusive species. Food is bountiful in the Amazon where beetle diversity can reach 700 species in just one tree. Elevations are not high within their wintering area, but there is plenty of topography as shown in the map’s inset.

In nature most species are not distributed randomly or evenly but are found in some sort of pattern. RMBO tested the spatial distribution of the winter locations the three geolocators recorded and found they were, indeed, not randomly or evenly distributed but in a clustered pattern, giving another bit of credence to the data.  

Black Swifts continue to intrigue us with more unanswered questions, i.e., do they roost on the wing or on the ground? The answers will emerge with further research. 

The last bird that breeds in the U.S. and Canada with an unknown winter destination has finally given up its secret. After years of research – and with some luck – three Colorado researchers have learned that Black Swifts travel more than 4,000 miles to spend the winter in Brazil. The destination came as a surprise to the researchers since Black Swifts have not been documented in Brazil.

On their frequent outings to observe swifts at waterfalls and caves in the southern Rockies, long-time Black Swift researchers Carolyn Gunn, Kim Potter of the U.S. Forest Service, and Jason Beason, Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory's special monitoring projects coordinator, often discussed how they could discover this missing piece of the bird’s basic life-cycle information.

Then rapid advancements in technology produced light-level geolocators, tiny devices weighing 1.2 grams that enable researchers to track small birds. The team raised funds to purchase four geolocators in 2009 and attached them to four Black Swifts they captured in western Colorado.

Luckily the researchers recaptured three of the four birds a year later. They removed the geolocators and analyzed the data. All three yielded similar information about the birds’ flight paths and their winter destination: the center of all the location fixes fell in northwest Brazil.

The 2010 State of the Birds Report listed the Black Swift as one of the species most vulnerable to the anticipated effects of climate change, making this research especially important to those involved with conservation and land management in the swift’s breeding range. The research was published in the March 2012 issue of The Wilson Journal of Ornithology.                                                                                                    Photos by Todd Patrick
Also see:
Background on Black Swift research
Story in the Denver Post
"The Coolest Bird: A Natural History of the Black Swift and Those Who Have Pursued It" by Rich Levad, available at the American Birding Association web site: www.aba.org/thecoolestbird.pdf

Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory’s International Team is monitoring and banding birds in the Chihuahuan Desert grasslands in northern Mexico with the help of 26 local field techs the team trained in early January.

As shown in the photo, field crews remove birds that are harmlessly captured in mist nets to gather data to guide conservation efforts. After receiving a USGS-issued leg band, the birds are weighed, measured and inspected before being released.

Birds including Baird’s Sparrow (pictured below), Grasshopper Sparrow, Chestnut-collared Longspur and many others winter in Mexican grasslands before returning to the Great Plains in spring. RMBO is working to conserve their disappearing winter habitat and boost their winter survival.

  Photos by Arvind Panjabi, International Program Director, Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory

The new Fall/Winter edition of The All-Bird Bulletin features five stories about RMBO's work. See pages 12 -16 to read: "New Model Identifies Bird Habitat Use at Multiple Scales," "'Boots on the Ground' Expands Habitat Conservation," "Taking Outreach from the Land to the Classroom Builds Future Conservation Ethic," "Critical Chihuahuan Desert Grasslands Rapidly Give Way to the Plow," and "Integrated Monitoring in Bird Conservation Regions (IMBCR)."

By Chuck Hundertmark, Compiler, Barr Lake Christmas Bird Count

Twenty-six volunteers tallied 68 species of birds across parts of Adams and Weld counties on January 2 for the Barr Lake Christmas Bird Count. The numbers of species and individual birds (18,562) were lower than past winters, but by day's end  the topic of conversation wasn’t about the numbers.

(Full list of birds found on the Barr Lake Christmas Bird Count.)
(Photo by Gregg Goodrich)

Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory will sponsor the Barr Lake Christmas Bird Count (CBC) on January 2, one of 48 CBC circles being surveyed in Colorado during the holiday season. The count is open to birders of all skill levels. Last year in the Barr Lake circle, 21 volunteers counted 27,446 birds of 63 species.

by Chuck Hundertmark

Birders heading for Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge will find Birding Hot Spots of Central New Mexico a handy guide, covering birding areas from just north of Albuquerque south to the refuge, one of the best-known in the country. Authors Judy Liddell and Barbara Hussey offer considerable and well-organized detail, making it easy to plan birding forays in the region. Published by Texas A & M University Press, the guide begins by introducing the area’s geography, life zones and habitats ranging from Chihuahuan desert scrubland to the rocky, spruce-fir-capped crest of the Sandia Mountains.

Forty people from as far away as Montana and Texas were in our Fort Collins office for three days last week to strategize on how to best accomplish seamless bird monitoring across the western landscape. These representatives of 15 federal, state and private partners and RMBO’s science staff have conducted the Integrated Monitoring in Bird Conservation Regions program for the past three years.