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June 12, 2006 At last, Avids atlas by Bill Whan In past years we haven't always mounted a trip in June. If you have to skip a month, it's not a bad choice. Migration has depleted bird variety by then, and it gets hot. Wetlands seem at their dullest in early summer, bird-wise, with breeders grown furtive and migrants absent, and woodlands are dark, their foliage concealing their inhabitants. Biting insects flourish in June, even while the fliers like butterflies and moths and dragonflies enliven a field trip. This year, however, June marked the shift into high gear of the six-year Ohio Breeding Bird Atlas project. This undertaking has numerous attractions for folks like us. It is a mixture of measured scientific data collection and a quest for thrilling discoveries. It gives special purpose to field work, encourages partnerships, and for those so inclined enables the use of innumerable toys-Web tools, GPS systems, hand-held audio, banding paraphernalia, giant flashlights, and so on. It encourages us to enlarge our views of birds, adding to field identification tasks those involved in closely observing behavior, learning natural history detail, and paying much closer attention to habitats, food sources, etc. Naturally, we had several atlasers and one regional coordinator in the group, so they taught everyone else the drill. We birded in some remote areas with little coverage; here our efforts would really count, and the chances of making a great discovery were higher. We spent the morning checking out grasslands and dense deciduous forest at Crown City Wildlife Area in Gallia and Lawrence counties, then an hour-plus at Cooper Hollow in Jackson Co, then stopped in Pickaway County at the water treatment plant and the Westfall road swale, before a final visit to Columbus's two yellow-crowned night-heron nests, where we found at least three new nestlings. We had some new participants, and hence the satisfaction of finding new birds for several. All of us learned to pay more attention to birds at this most important stage of their life cycles. We found eighty-one species, all potentially at least Ohio nesters, and confirmed many as breeders. The only real surprise was an improbable Wilson's snipe in Pickaway County, a bird that will bear watching. We did a pretty good run through the nesters expected in the rather limited habitats we visited (missing of course are many birds of the northern counties' habitats, especially wetlands, Lake Erie, and coniferous forests); our big misses locally included the cuckoos, Baltimore oriole (!), the smaller hawks, American redstart (!), several sparrows, and of course night birds. Here's our list, this time with those confirmed as at least probably nesting with asterisks:
Page updated 06/12/06 © Columbus Audubon 2006 |
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