Looking Back at 2021: the Nevada Bird Count & IMBCR programs

Wow, how time is flying!  Our 2022 field work is now well underway.  We had a very successful 2021, and are bringing those experiences to the current year!  So we will be sharing a short series of blogposts to talk about what we were working on last year, and some of the highlights and maybe a few lessons learned.

I’ll start off talking about our Nevada Bird Count/IMBCR (Integrated Monitoring of Bird Conservation Regions) crew/projects.  It’s probably not a surprise to anyone, but man, 2021 was DRY. Scarily dry.  We started off helping out with surveys for the thrasher program in April - Dawn will be sharing some highlights from that later – and our southern Nevada point count surveys. I wrote up a blogpost on one of my thrasher surveys down there last year – you can find that here.  My overwhelming memory is of large numbers of desert shrubs, with few to no leaves – even the creosotes with brown dessicated leaves, and branches that had died back within the past year. Even the seemingly-ever-present Black-throated Sparrows appeared impacted – many did not appear to be breeding (unusually, I never saw any breeding evidence for them during my southern Nevada surveys). Even singing was affected – one creosote site where I’ve camped and surveyed most years since 2008, where there are always Black-throated Sparrows singing during the breeding season – I heard one singing a single short phrase at about 3 o’clock in the morning, and that was it.  It brought Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to mind.  One of our sites in the southern Great Basin looms similarly large in my mind – very few birds singing, with many of the sagebrush only supporting a branch or two that contained leaves.

Our two primary Nevada Bird Count projects were located at Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge and along the Truckee River. Our Ash Meadows surveys were definitely a breath of fresh air amongst our other southern Nevada upland projects, and it was wonderful to be surveying near water!  My favorite survey was definitely our Crystal Reservoir transect that samples the wet ash meadows near the reservoir.  Summer Tanagers, a few Phainopepla and Vermilion Flycatchers, lots of Bewick’s Wrens … and wet feet!

Our Truckee River surveys continued work begun in the 1990s along the lower Truckee River, from Lockwood down to Nixon. As with our Ash Meadows surveys, we definitely appreciated surveying near water!  What stands out the most to me was the growth of the young cottonwoods (and a few willows) that had established in 2017-2018, and surveying points where once we’d had an unobstructed view for hundreds of meters, and now we looked out at a bank of young cottonwoods, their tops waving in the breeze.  On one of the long-term area search plots, where for years we had only had Yellow Warblers migrating through, now there were several territories, two with confirmed young.  It was incredibly heartening!

Upper McCarran #11, in 2019 ... you can see the young cottonwoods coming up!

Same place, 2021 ... you can just barely see the top of the hill & gallery cottonwoods!

Last but not least, we conducted 109 surveys of IMBCR plots for the BLM and Forest Service in Nevada and eastern California.  Our Forest Service surveys are only on the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, and cover all three conservation regions, in the Carson Range/Sierras, Great Basin, and Mojave Desert.  Our BLM surveys were only within BCR 9 (the so-called Great Basin region). We definitely appreciated the opportunity to cover most of Nevada and some of eastern California, and having such widespread coverage was helpful to look at drought impacts.

I mentioned above that we appeared to be seeing impacts of the drought on the Black-throated Sparrows in our IMBCR surveys.  During the season, it seemed I was detecting fewer of them, and when I was, it seemed there were more at higher elevations than “normal,” and further north.  Talking to Ned, he, too, was seeing them in greater numbers on his more northern surveys.  So I did a quick data dive – I didn’t look at elevation, so I can’t say whether my initial impressions were correct in that regard, but we certainly did see some changes in latitude!  The following quick video shows the results of three years of our BLM surveys – the numbers are detections of Black-throated Sparrows within 100m, summarized at the transect level, but to maintain consistency between years, I only used data from points that were surveyed in each of the three years: 2019, 2020, and 2021.  We can see that there’s a fair amount of annual variation in those numbers, but that there was a clear tendency for fewer detections overall, and fewer detections in southern Nevada.

 

The total abundance (of all species) was even clearer on these surveys, declining over the three-year period, with the steepest drop in 2021, where total detections (tallied as above) in 2021 were 25% lower those in 2019.  Here’s how those results were visualized.

 

 

So, it was an interesting year for us, and we are looking forward to seeing what 2022 holds!  Stay tuned for our next installment ….

- Jen

 

 

 

 

Surveying in the Spring Mountains, May

Well, tomorrow’s plot starts up there…,I was thinking to myself as I gazed upward, enjoying the sunset on the cliffs of Potosi Mountain’s neighboring peaks. Part of the standard evening routine is determining what time I need to set the alarm for the morning, factoring in that I must climb a full 1,000 feet higher than my current elevation, in a half- mile, 30 minutes before sunrise. While the implications of this were setting in, I heard a Scott’s Oriole singing.  It was a welcome reprieve from the unwelcome realization that it was not yet dark, and yet I will be waking up in 8 hours for a doozy of a hike. I poked my head around the corner to see the gorgeous male Scott’s Oriole perched atop a lonely Pinyon, and got to appreciate his beauty for a brief moment before he realized I was watching. It was truly a lovely, peaceful scene-not a soul in sight, shadows growing long as the sun’s amber glow bathes the cliffs, while the melody of my oriole carries across the valley.

This survey is part of our IMBCR program on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands, which I briefly discussed in my previous post about Grasshopper Sparrows. IMBCR stands for Integrated Monitoring in Bird Conservation Regions, and is a very neat project developed by Bird Conservancy of the Rockies in 2007.  It connects a massive survey area, nearly the entire western United States, under a common protocol, and generates some very interesting and useful data. These surveys are point-count surveys with 16 points, arranged in a grid, each point 250 meters apart, so that a 1kmx1km grid is created. In order to be a valid survey, at least 6 points must be completed.

I have surveyed this plot once before … have I mentioned it’s steep?!  Every direction you look is a stunning mountain-scape of sheer cliffs and infinite vistas. On this particular plot it is only humanly possible to (safely) reach 6 survey points; dangerous cliffs and scree slopes prevent access to a majority of the plot.  So, I have painted a picture of a very difficult location to traverse, but it is not without its rewards. A previous surveyor found Rufous-crowned Sparrows two years in a row up there, even confirming breeding once!  I missed them the first time, but was hopeful for this second time. I should have known that if I lugged my camera up there, they would smell me coming and make themselves scarce. You can likely gather I did not detect any Rufous-crowns on this survey either. Gray Vireos, Black-chinned Sparrows, Scott’s Orioles, and White-throated Swifts would have to suffice—poor me, I know, it’s a tough job, but some one’s got to do it!

 

 

Once safely down the mountain, it was just a little jaunt back to camp.  Once there, it was time to decompress and pack up camp. But, first things first, after a hike like that I needed ice cold refreshment. Fortunately for me, modern technology has created miraculously insulated vessels that hold ice for days.  It was only 9:00 (I had been up since 4:00, after all) yet the sun was still warming the air to a point just beyond comfort.  With no shade in sight, and the patch created by my truck rapidly dwindling, it was time to finish up, pack up, and get on out of here.  Another adventure awaits, as I get out the maps and begin navigating to tomorrow’s survey! 

- Ned

 

 

Grasshopper Sparrows!

While conducting field work this past breeding season, my randomly generated IMBCR plot found me in Northern Nevada’s Owyhee Desert.  IMBCR stands for Integrated Monitoring in Bird Conservation Regions, and is a program developed by the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies in 2007.  Since then, a number of organizations have collaborated with the Bird Conservancy to conduct these surveys across much of the American West.  Each breeding season these surveys are completed from North Dakota to West Texas, Colorado to California, Washington to Arizona, and many places in between.  Three years ago, GBBO joined this partnership, and began surveys in Nevada, Arizona, and California.  The large scope of these standardized surveys creates a powerful tool to monitor birds at a regional level, including conservation priority species across the breadth of their ranges.

So back to the Owyhee Desert, where I’m driving roads that haven’t seen traffic in who knows how long.  After finding a newly-eroded canyon through my access road, I nearly gave up on this survey, but Ben (my survey partner, who was doing a nearby Nevada Bird Count transect) and I finally ended up finding a navigable alternative and got to camp well after dark.  When I woke up, I was in a landscape that I didn’t know existed in Nevada.  As far as I could see was lush perennial grassland, several species of grass, waist-high Great Basin Wild Rye among them.  My first impression as I started walking from camp was the almost deafening chorus of Western Meadowlarks.  It wasn’t until minute 2 of my second point that I heard it, almost dismissible as insect noise, this quiet, mechanical “tsk-tsk-tzzzzz”.  At first I did pass it off as a Grasshopper, but it was so regular and a little too loud, and then it clicked. Grasshopper SPARROW! After nearly 10 minutes of staking out this particular cluster of bunchgrass, I finally saw him and my suspicions were confirmed. Tucked just below the highest point of the grass was a small, squat, flat-headed, relatively large-billed sparrow cocking his head back and singing his insect-like song. 

As my survey went on I encountered several more, and by the end of the morning I had conservatively counted 11 singing males.  This species has been on my radar ever since I heard tales a few years ago of these guys in northern and eastern Nevada, but I had never come across them.  Jean Linsdale, back in 1951, reported them as a summer resident in small numbers in the northeast part of the state, but records have been sparse.  Not surprising then, when I finally found them, I was in one of the most inaccessible parts of Nevada. The combination of distance from town and rough roads (where roads exist at all!) makes the Owyhee Desert pretty much off limits to most Nevada Birders. Given all this, and factoring in annual variation, it is hard to tell what is actually going on up there. Maybe there are always loads of Grasshopper Sparrows singing their hearts out in the Owyhee Desert with no humans to hear them, or maybe we had a bonanza year because of higher precipitation levels and greater growth of grasses and forbs.  We will be surveying there again in 2020, so we’ll report back then!

The Owyhee Desert is not the only part of the state that is largely inaccessible and has unique habitat.  With such a large area and such concentrated populations, Nevada has long been one of, if not the most under-birded state.  This combined with other factors led to the creation of Great Basin Bird Observatory and the first edition of the Nevada Breeding Bird Atlas 20 years ago….and 20 years later there are still new things to learn about Nevada’s avian community. So for those who are willing to get off the beaten path and explore a bit, who knows what you might find!

For those who are unfamiliar and/or curious, the Owyhee Desert is Northeast of Winnemucca, in between the Santa Rosa and Independence Mountain Ranges. It sprawls into Idaho to the North, and peters out as it hits the Owyhee Bluffs to the south, about 30 miles north of I-80.  It can be accessed from the south via Midas, but the primary entry points are on the east side through the Duck Creek Indian Reservation and the Town of Owyhee or by Wilson Creek Reservoir.

- Ned Bohman

(The photos are from Ben's survey of the nearby Nevada Bird Count transect.)