Sampling Plan for Sand Creek Massacre National Monument

Hanni, David; Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory

A cooperative effort between Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory and Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site to inventory and monitor birds at the site. In 2005, the National Park Service in cooperation with Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory will initiate an inventory/monitoring protocol on Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site located in Kiowa County, Colorado (Fig. 1). The cooperative effort to inventory and monitor birds on Sand Creek will enhance other monitoring efforts currently being conducted at different spatial scales including site (National Park, regional and state). The major benefit to participating in a regional monitoring effort is that it will allow the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site to compare information collected at the site level to regional and state levels. Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory will implement standardized monitoring techniques on Sand Creek National Historic Site that are consistent with those conducted at regional scales . Habitat based point transects are the keystone of RMBO’s landscape-level bird monitoring, special species inventories provide site-specific information on an array of species that are typically not well represented through randomized sampling efforts. These species are generally either nocturnal, colonial, locally distributed within specific habitats, or widely distributed in low-density (within or across habitats). Most techniques aimed at locating special species employ censusing (i.e., all individuals within a defined area are counted), rather than sampling. Therefore, data from these inventories can also be used for monitoring purposes, regardless of the number of individuals observed. Depending on the species, a variety of techniques will be employed, including targeted area searches of non-block habitats (e.g. cliffs, prairie-dog towns, burns, waterbodies, wetlands, etc.), counts of colonial nesters at colonies, and call-response surveys using recorded vocalizations (for both diurnal and nocturnal species).