Bird Distribution on the Olympic Peninsula

Sharpe, Fred

Sixty percent of the vertebrate species in Olympic's forests are birds. Birds are easily detectible at low cost compared to small mammals over the larger mammals. My research has been done mainly using pre-dawn surveys over a wide variety of habitats within the park, rather than going into one valley or forest habitat and studying it intensively. My strategy has been to visit as many different areas of the park and along the coastal areas as I could and simply go into one and do one dawn or two dawn surveys in that area. I divided the park into 14 or 15 basic habitats and tried to visit them relatively equally to get an idea of bird distribution. I also inventoried south down to the Columbia River and spent time in the Willapa Hills and Black Hills region and coast estuaries. These areas are largely neglected by ornithologists and biologists and the coastal estuaries are extremely important, especially the Columbia River system as they influence our marine bird distribution all the way up the Pacific coast even past Cape Flattery.