Ground Work for Long Term Bird Survey at Zena

22 November 2009

1030 AM - 1:30 PM

Zena Farms of Willamette University

I spent the late morning and mid-day working with Mary Lugg, Jeffry Kitts, and Ben Gutzler to start laying the ground work for a long-term set of points from which to survey birds at the Zena Farm. Mary was coordinating our efforts today as part of her Behavioral Ecology term project which is also contributing to her senior thesis.

The weather was broken clouds with a few showers that made for lots of mud during our hiking, but otherwise wonderful field time. We spent our survey efforts in the 'House' and 'Savanna Restoration' blocks and were in the constant company of birds including:

American Kestrel - 1

Red-tailed Hawk - 1

Cackling Goose - 22 (high fly over)

Northern Flicker - 1

California Quail - 5

American Crow - 8 (high fly over)

Western Scrub Jay - 9

Black-capped Chickadee - 2

Red-breasted Nuthatch - 1

Bewick's Wren - 3

American Robin - 90

Varied Thrush - 1

European Starling - 180 (high fly over)

Yellow-rumped Warbler - 5

Song Sparrow - 18

Lincoln's Sparrow - 1 (best bird of the day)

Golden-Crowned Sparrow - 13

White-crowned Sparrow - 3

Dark-eyed Junco - 3

Spotted Towhee - 7

House Finch - 2

Pacific Tree Frog (3) and chipmunk sp (1) were also heard during our ground work.

Most of the time was focused on trouble-shooting the use of the hand held GPS units and learning the lay of the land between the points we were trying to lay out. Today's points were 'draft' points until Mary can place them in GIS to allow us to better judge their relative merits. In general I think our points were too close together and we might need to create some sort of a 'buffer' rule so that the survey spot is surrounded with at least 80% of the target habitat type. I was a bit concerned that many of the points were on ecotones instead in core zones, but the landscape and management plans are still new to me.

We marked putative points with pink flagging tape on land marks that had some chance of remaining stable for the next 6 months, but the eventual goal would be to also add some longer-term stakes and durable tags.

The single best bunch of birds was a huge mixed species flock of sparrows and thrushes along the low road between Willamette's property and Anne Cupich's hich included the diminutive mountain breeding sparrow named after Lincoln. It has been a couple of years since I have seen this bird and it made my day. It was the least common bird of the day being an 'occasional' species for this part of the Willamette Valley.