Tag Archives: Quabbin Birding

Field Notes from the Quabbin: Moose Mamas and Magnolia Warblers

Posted on July 16, 2018 by William Freedberg

A Magnolia Warbler perches in a shrub. Photo by William Freedberg

A late-June morning at the Quabbin Reservoir:  Winter Wren songs echo from hollows and wetland thickets. Blackburnian Warblers whisper their buzzy, quiet notes from the canopy. Blue-headed Vireos squeak and argue over perches in spruce trees. These birds, like many species that prefer conifers or highland forests, are rarely seen outside of migration in eastern Massachusetts. At the Quabbin, it’s hard to miss them.

In the background there’s a constant clamor from the Quabbin’s most vocal and abundant woodland breeders: Red-eyed Vireos, Veeries, Ovenbirds, and Scarlet Tanagers.

Amid the birdsong, there’s the faint scratching of my pencil and clipboard. Point 4, Minute 1 // Scarlet Tanager. Male. Calling. 19 meters // Ovenbird. Unknown sex. Singing. 33 meters.  The birds are a thick during dawn chorus, and between recording each species, sex, behavior, and distance from me, it’s hard to keep up. The survey period passes quickly, and it’s time to hike to the next count site.

The data we collected that morning will eventually be used by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), an organization which studies large-scale environmental change at over 70 sites across the US, and which partners with Mass Audubon to collect bird data in New England. Normally, it takes just one person to run bird surveys—but recent security concerns at the Quabbin mean that all field technicians are now accompanied by a NEON escort to drive around restricted-access roads.

My field escort that day was Jamie, a soft-spoken botanist who had just moved to New England from Appalachia. When he mentioned he hoped to see his first moose in the Quabbin, I thought it was a farfetched idea, not knowing that around 100 moose make their year-round homes there. As if to prove a point, a cow moose stepped into the road later that day as we were on our way out.

A blurry, through-the-windshield photo of the moose that wouldn’t move.

We paused before inching the car towards the moose. The moose paused, too, and took several deliberate paces towards us. We noticed a smaller second pair of ears protruding from the roadside vegetation, and realized the moose was putting itself between us and its calf. That was our cue to put the car in reverse and give it some room; we would have to wait it out if we wanted to get to our destination safely.

Rolling down the windows, we were surprised to hear a singing Magnolia Warbler, a rare breeder for Central Massachusetts. The banana-yellow male flew across the road, giving us excellent looks at his black mask and bold stripes. I broke out a granola bar and Jamie unwrapped his lunch as we watched the moose feed and listened to the warblers. The mammoth ungulate in our way eventually ambled off, but we were in no rush to leave: life at the Quabbin was good.

America’s Biggest Ecological Monitoring Project

Posted on July 11, 2018 by William Freedberg

This summer, I’ve been surveying birds at the Quabbin Reservoir for Mass Audubon and NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network. The deep forests and hollows of the Quabbin watershed host scarce breeders like Cerulean and Canada Warbler, along with most common woodland breeders in the state. The Quabbin’s size and diversity of intact habitats make it an ideal study site for a program like NEON.

NEON is an exciting project because of its scale. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the network comprises more than 80 sites across the country’s 20 ecoregions. At each site, NEON coordinates teams of scientists to keep tabs on a variety of ecological indicators. These include large-scale factors like water chemistry, greenhouse gasses, and tree cover, as well as narrower topics like fish DNA, bird diversity, and disease prevalence in ticks, mice and mosquitoes.

A Scarlet Tanager with insect prey, perched on a snag by the Quabbin. Photo by Will Freedberg.

 

NEON treats birds as one piece of a vast puzzle: by studying how long-term ecological trends line up with each other, the project aims to parse out the causes and consequences of environmental change.

Most importantly, all NEON data is free and publicly available. It’s fun to browse if you’re curious about any of these topics, but scientists can also leverage these massive datasets to answer specific questions about ecosystem function.

 

Strategies For Bird Surveys

Mass Audubon has been responsible for NEON’s bird data in New England since the project’s inception. Each year, we send observers (called “field technicians”) to monitor bird numbers and diversity at the Quabbin, as well as Bartlett Forest in New Hampshire.

A diagram showing the layout of bird survey points in a NEON grid. Adapted from Thibault (2015)

Technicians are responsible for surveying a number of randomly selected patches of forest, which are each divided into 3×3 grids of survey points. By standing in one place and counting birds at each evenly spaced point in a grid, the technicians minimize double-counting birds, and get a representative subsample of birds present in each grid.

Even skilled birders won’t detect every bird at a point. To get around this, NEON scientists adjust bird count data with models that account for birds that were present, but undetected by the observer.

Observers are also less likely to detect birds that are far away from them, and more likely to notice birds that are close by. So, field technicians record their distance from each bird with a rangefinder; distant birds are given more “weight” in the model for calculating actual bird abundance. This is based on the assumption that the technician recorded most nearby birds, but missed more that were further away.

Next week, I’ll be posting some entries from my field notebook, and a typical day in the life of a Mass Audubon/NEON bird technician. Stay tuned for some stories from the field.