Breeding bird inventory of Petroglyph National Monument, with special emphasis on species associated with rocky escarpment habitat
Jones H, Walter C, Cox E, Schofield L, Johnson M. 2024. Breeding bird inventory of Petroglyph National Monument, with special emphasis on species associated with rocky escarpment habitat. Natural Resource Report. NPS/SCPN/NRR—2024/2624. National Park Service. Fort Collins, Colorado. https://doi.org/10.36967/2302308
Petroglyph National Monument, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, hosts numerous bird communities. In 2019, a Visitor Use Management Plan formalized a sustainable trail system to manage public access and use on the monument’s trails. This necessitates an understanding of how trails will impact birds along a 27-kilometer-long rocky escarpment, which may provide nesting habitat for raptors and habitat-specialist songbirds. Continued urban expansion around the monument’s boundaries and climate change are additionally likely to impact bird populations. We therefore used (1) point-count surveys to inventory breeding birds across the full extent of the monument and (2) area searches to understand if proposed escarpment trail-crossing locations would affect nesting habitat. We conducted 196 point-count surveys and 15 area searches, detecting 57 species in over 1200 detections; using these data, we estimated breeding densities for nine species. We found distinct bird communities in grassland, shrubland, and rocky escarpment habitat, and at least 27 species of open-habitat and pinyon-juniper passage migrants. However, suburban expansion showed pronounced effects on bird spatial distributions: non-native and generalist species were most common near the suburban boundary, while grassland-specialist species showed an aversion to non-grassland edges. We found no evidence of raptor breeding behavior during area searches, likely because the nearby riparian corridor provides superior nesting habitat, and many areas of the escarpment are subject to high human disturbance. The proposed trail network will likely reduce the negative impacts of social trails on breeding birds and is unlikely to significantly affect raptor and songbird nesting habitat on the escarpment.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Jones, Harrison; Walter, Chanteil; Cox, Emma; Schofield, Lynn; Johnson, Matthew
- Date of Issue
- 2024-02
- Publisher
- National Park Service
- DOI
- 10.36967/2302308
- Units
- NRSS , PETR , SCPN
- Keywords
- Arid Grassland, Avian, Biology, Bird, Breeding, Habitat, Inventory, Inventory and Monitoring Division, New Mexico, Petroglyph National Monument, Raptor, Rocky Escarpment, Social Trails, Southern Colorado Plateau Network, Species Inventory