Monitoring the birds of the National Park Service, Northern Colorado Plateau Network, 2009 field season report

White, Chris

In 2009, the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory, in cooperation with its partner, the National Park Service, completed its fifth year of a habitat-based landbird monitoring program. This program is designed to provide rigorous population trend data on most diurnal, regularly occurring breeding landbird species throughout the Northern Colorado Plateau Inventory and Monitoring Network. This information is useful for land managers and supports the National Park Service‟s goal of developing long-term monitoring of all biological resources in all park units.The program, Monitoring Birds of the National Park Service, Northern Colorado Plateau Network, is consistent with goals emphasized by the U.S. North American Bird Conservation Initiative Committee (U.S. NABCI Monitoring Subcommittee, 2007).We survey 45 transects within 11 National Park units. We place 15 transects in each of the three habitats of interest: Low-Elevation Riparian, Pinyon-Juniper, and Sage Shrubland. To increase sample size, we survey all transects twice during the breeding season. In 2009, we conducted an inventory on Pipe Spring National Monument.This year we surveyed 100% of the assigned transects with 90 transect visits completed. We recorded 11,640 birds of 121 species. We detected 3,903 birds of 83 species in Low-Elevation Riparian, 3,986 birds of 83 species in Pinyon-Juniper, 3,566 birds of 86 species in Sage Shrubland. We detected a total of and 39 species in Pipe Spring National Monument.We pooled the 2005-2009 data and used program DISTANCE 6.0 (Thomas et al. 2010) to generate density estimates for species with sufficient data. This year we calculated density estimates for 56 species in at least one habitat. The data yielded robust density estimates (Coefficient of Variation, CV < 50%) for 55 species in 2009. We should be able to reach our target of detecting a population change of at least 3% within 30 years for these 55 species. In Low-elevation Riparian, the following five species had the highest densities: Black-chinned Hummingbird, Violet-green Swallow, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Yellow Warbler, and Spotted Towhee. In Pinyon-Juniper habitat, the following five species had the highest densities: Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Black-throated Gray Warbler, Bushtit, Juniper Titmouse, and Chipping Sparrow. In Sage Shrubland, the following five species had the highest densities: Brewer‟s Sparrow, Vesper Sparrow, Green-tailed Towhee, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, and Lark Sparrow.RMBO recorded 46 bird species that are of conservation and management concern throughout NCPN. We calculated density estimates for 24 of these species.

Monitoring the birds of the National Park Service, Northern Colorado Plateau Network, 2009 field season report

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