Virginia Important Bird Areas Conservation News - Focus on Team Warbler, the Atlantic Flyway Initiative and Saltmarsh Habitat and Avian Research Project (SHARP)

Audubon in Virginia has several conservation projects to highlight during this season:  One of our most  exciting is an international partnership between Richmond Audubon Society, Panama Audubon Society National Audubon Society and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) called: Team Warbler -- From Chesapeake Bay to Panama Bay and Back -- Cross Cultural Connections Supporting Sustainable Communities.

Working under a Community Engagement grant from VCU, championed by Cathy Viverette, VCU Life Sciences Research Associate, this project seeks to connect students, researchers and Richmond Audubon in the Chesapeake Bay watershed to Panama Audubon in the Panama Bay watershed to raise awareness of and better understand the Prothonotary Warbler.

Here is an account from Dr. Lesley Bulluck, VCU Biology Professor, who led a team of VCU students and associated researchers to Panama in early January:   “The VCU college class arrived on the afternoon of January 6 and drove to Gamboa where we would stay for the entire trip.  The house we stayed in was owned by our guide Guido Berguido and was tucked nicely up to the rainforest edge.  This prime location allowed us to wake that first morning to see numerous new tropical bird and mammal species at the feeders – red-legged honeycreepers, blue-crowned motmot, and tamarind monkeys were just a few highlights.  We spent most of the day on January 7 training the students on field methods and visiting two of our field sites.

On January 8 and through January 13 we collected data in each of these six sites twice; we split up into two groups and the students alternated each day between banding in the mangroves and taking data on density and foraging rates in the mudflats of Panama Bay.  On January 12, a group of middle school students from San Carlos came to our banding station in Playa Bonita to observe and learn about what we were doing.  They were an enthusiastic group who were ready to get muddy and make observations of birds and mammals during the long trek to the station.  In the mangroves, we captured a total of 160 individual birds of 25 different species and banded most of individuals that are Neartic-Neotropical migrants.

We conducted most of our 2 minute foraging observations on 6 species and ~280 individuals across the three mudflat sites.  We were happy to catch 26 of our target species, the Prothonotary Warbler, which we have been studying long-term here in Virginia.”

Another exciting on-the-ground conservation project in Virginia is our involvement with Maryland/DC Audubon and associated researchers on the Saltmarsh Habitat and Avian Research Project (SHARP), which benefits marshland species such as Seaside Sparrow, Saltmarsh Sparrow, Nelson’s Sparrow, Willet, American Black Duck and Clapper Rail.  The overall project objective is to identify important regions for tidal marsh birds along the non-barrier-island Atlantic States  (Bird Conservation Region 30) and to identify which regions and species within this area may be most sensitive to land and seascape change (e.g. sea-level rise, coastal or upland/watershed development, and fresh or marine water quality degradation).

This survey helps Audubon in our regional conservation initiative, the Atlantic Flyway Initiative (AFI), which exists to bring together Audubon programs in eastern seaboard states.  The AFI saltmarsh working group works to identify threats to salt marshes and the habitat they provide to high priority species.  We will be conducting surveys mid-April to the end of June of this year.  To learn more about this exciting conservation project, please visit www.tidalmarshbirds.org .  And many thanks to the Virginia Society of Ornithology Conservation Committee for their conservation grant to support part of the field work of this critical conservation project in Virginia IBAs in marshlands of the Chesapeake Bay.

Submitted by Mary Elfner, Audubon’s Virginia Important Bird Areas Coordinator, August 1, 2011