Landbird community monitoring at Moores Creek National Battlefield: 2014 data summary

Byrne, Michael; Kurimo-Beechuk, Elizabeth

Birds are an important component of park ecosystems. Due to their high body temperature, rapid metabolism, and high ecological position in most food webs, birds are also good indicators of the effects of local and regional ecosystem changes. Patterns in the community composition, distribution, and occurrence of breeding birds provide a metric for assessing ecological integrity and sustainability in southeastern U. S. ecosystems. Further, the responses of these community characteristics to various management actions (e.g., fire, invasive-species treatments), natural disturbances, and other stressors will improve our understanding of their effects on the condition of park resources. This report summarizes data collected during implementation of the SECN landbird community monitoring protocol (Byrne et al. 2014) at Moores Creek National Battlefield in 2014. • Automated recording devices collected bird detection/non-detection data (i.e., presence/absence) from ten spatially balanced random locations at the battlefield. • Approximately 600 minutes of recordings were collected May–June, to represent a closed population, and were evaluated for the presence of vocalizing birds. • Fifty-four native species of birds were detected during the sampling effort. • M onitoring efforts provided the first NPS-documented occurrences of eight new species at the battlefield and additions to the official species list: barn swallow, blue grosbeak, boat-tailed grackle, eastern wood-pewee, marsh wren, northern rough-winged swallow, purple martin, and worm-eating warbler. • One non-native species, the house finch, was detected during the sampling effort. • The American crow, blue jay, blue-gray gnatcatcher, Carolina chickadee, Carolina wren, eastern towhee, great-crested flycatcher, northern cardinal, pine warbler, red-bellied woodpecker, summer tanager, and tufted titmouse were the most frequently occurring and widely distributed species in the battlefield, occurring at all sampling locations. • The full dataset, and associated metadata, can be acquired from the NPS data store at the Integrated Resource Management Applications portal (https://irma.nps.gov/App/Portal/Home).

Landbird community monitoring at Moores Creek National Battlefield: 2014 data summary

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