January Open Lands Day marked the first survey of the year for SOLC’s new Volunteer Bird Surveyors Program. Our goal for the Volunteer Bird Surveyors Program is to track the seasonal use of the Rogue River Preserve (RRP) in different habitats, looking for patterns in migratory, breeding, and all year resident birds. As we enter our 8th year of caring for RRP, these monthly surveys will help paint a larger picture of our habitat restoration efforts and will provide data for researchers all around the world.
With binoculars in hand, eBird (a platform to log bird sightings) tracking on, 22 birders ventured around the RRP for our first monthly survey. The morning’s light rains took a pause and the sun peeked through the clouds for us to spot 15 bird species, most notably many Lewis’s Woodpeckers.
We counted 69 individual Lewis’s Woodpeckers, signifying RRP is a great overwintering site for these unique woodpeckers. Lewis’s Woodpeckers are listed as a sensitive species in the Northwest region; their population has declined by 60% since the 1960s. Research shows snags and decaying trees in riparian cottonwood forest, oak-pine woodlands, and burned ponderosa pine forests are their preferred nesting habitats. The threats of logging, the reduction and loss of cultural fires, as well as hot crown wildfires have resulted in large areas of trees in the same age range, leaving too few snags and decaying trees available for nesting.
After this past fall’s grassland prescribed burn and a proposed oak woodland controlled burn this year at RRP, SOLC’s monthly surveys could shed some light on conservation strategies for the Lewis’s Woodpecker and other special status birds.
If you would like to join this volunteer group eccentrically self-labeled as Cuckoos looking for Cuckoos, please contact Myco Schroeder, SOLC’s Education and Engagement Specialist, at myco@landconserve.org.
We would like to extend a big thank you to the Oregon Birding Association for awarding SOLC with the Oregon Fund for Ornithology as it was instrumental in starting this new volunteer program.
